Small Details You Missed In The Call Of Duty: Modern Warfare Trailer

Activision and Infinity Ward have taken the world by storm with the long anticipated release of the trailer for the newest Call of Duty game, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare. Set to release on October 25th, the game isn't a continuation in the series, but rather a kind of soft reboot that's not quite prequel, not quite sequel. With stunning graphics provided by a whole new engine, the trailer assured us that the shadowy, ultra-realistic footage we saw was from actual in-game footage.

The new game puts an emphasis on realism both in the true-to-life graphics, rendered with cutting-edge motion capture, and the dark, gritty subject matter at the core of the missions. Whereas games like Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 have veered into the fantastical with zombies and time travel, this Modern Warfare title is literally all about modern warfare: the horrors and high tension of ripped-from-the-headlines situations that will feel eerily, and unfortunately, familiar. Were you able to spot the recreations of IRL moments in the trailer? We strapped on our night vision goggles and analyzed every tidbit of intel we could gather from the Call of Duty: Modern Warfare trailer.

The game's reveal has summoned up feelings of nostalgia for old players, and the trailer took full advantage by treating fans to the return of an old favorite: Captain John Price of the British Special Air Service. He narrates the start of the trailer as soldiers slip from the shadows, the ember of his signature cigar glowing in the dark. He even has his old boonie hat back, barely discernible in the darkness. His identity is definitively confirmed when he says his callsign, "Bravo Six, going dark."

Price has served as something of a main character in the Modern Warfare series, but his inspiration dates even further back. You might remember that there was a British character named Price with an impressive mustache in the very first Call of Duty game and its sequel. Players apparently got attached to this grizzled old soldier, and he looks more grizzled than ever in the new trailer.

With its own story and brand, the game is separate from the other Modern Warfare games and will thus go places where no CoD has gone before. Namely, into current controversy and conflict. We really mean it when we say that the title is full embracing the phrase "modern warfare." The new game is set to explore real-to-life events, mirroring actual military conflict that you might read about in the newspaper.

"We are telling a story about modern war in the real world," said Jacob Minkoff, the single-player design director on Modern Warfare in an interview with The Verge. "If we whitewash it, if we backpedal from it, if we show a world where the heroes fight the terrorists and win, you never see the impact on the average person, the collateral damage, or the morally gray situations that soldiers themselves have to face."

From the trailer, we saw an eerie glimpse of the collateral damage: a little boy wearing a gas mask. Amid the gas and bombs, it's difficult not to think of current situations in Syria, where children fear planes more than anything. We also see relief workers caught up in explosions, the bombing of civilian areas. With those crazy good graphics, we get a first-person perspective of what it's like when Syrian civilians are bombed by Russian planes.

You know what happens in the real world? In modern warfare? Everyone participates, everyone gets caught up in the conflict. Women included. As light bled into the hold of a cargo plane, we got a first look at the face of one of our protagonists in the game: Farah Karim.

You don't know this from the trailer, but Karim is a rebel fighter in the Middle East. A commander of a freedom fighting militia, her character was based on the real life women of YPJ, or "Women's Protection Units," in Syria and Iraq. We hear her voice, and see her fling herself out of a plane, but we get little to no detail about her actual story. The narrative lead for Modern Warfare, Taylor Kurosaki, said that it was time for her story to be told in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter. "It's far overdue for a character like that, who is based in the reality of war as we know it today, to come to fruition and see the light of day."

Did anyone see Zero Dark Thirty? If so, you might have felt deja vu when watching the green-washed night vision footage of silent soldiers breaking into a quiet compound in the Modern Warfare trailer. This has fans wondering if the emphasis on real life conflict will lead to a mission or scene based around SEAL Team Six's taking down of Osama Bin Laden himself.

News networks have put together recreations of the event, mapping out the compound in order to better explain what went down. Even with the brief look from the Modern Warfare trailer, it could be argued that the folks at Infinity Ward may have recreated the blocky, adobe buildings from the fateful raid back in 2011. Bin Laden has only been mentioned tangentially in previous Call of Duty games. Other titles like The Death of Osama bin Laden outright remade the assault on the compound. Considering the details from the trailer and dedication to "modern warfare," will the new game also recreate the famous raid?

The new trailer showed a variety of locations: from the rubble of a Middle Eastern city to an innocuous-looking townhouse to the streets of London in chaos. Recognize those big ads amid the fire and flame? One map will be in London's famous tourist trap, Piccadilly Circus. Rather than tourists taking selfies or shoppers hurrying along, the square is populated with terrorists shooting into cars and police officers taking cover. A bombing in Piccadilly is what sets off the events for the game in what's sure to be a hugely controversial scene.

The imagery is being compared to the infamous "No Russian" airport mission from Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 wherein players massacred civilians in a Russian airport. This new bombing scene in Piccadilly might similarly hit too close to home, considering the rise in terrorist attacks in cities like London and Paris. But, as design director Jacob Minkoff said, "War isn't on some battlefield any more, it's in everybody's cities. It's in the cities of the people living in the Middle East, it's in our cities. If we're going to tell a story about modern warfare, terrorism and the global war on terror has to be involved. Otherwise it's not telling the true story."

Despite getting inspiration from the modern day, the all-new Modern Warfare doesn't appear to fear embracing the past. In fact, the title and the creators behind it seem to be counting on the return of longtime fans alongside a new generation of players. Thus the trailer was one part new details sure to impress the picky players of today and one part nostalgia-fest with Captain Price giving a nod to the loyal fanbase of old.

"Who's your team?" He is asked at the end of the trailer. "Some old comrades," he replies.

Goosebumps? Goosebumps. Those who have been around since the beginning are his old comrades. That or maybe even other familiar faces like John "Soap" McTavish or Simon "Ghost" Riley. It's a brave new world where nostalgia sells, so who is to say what characters will be resurrected for the new Modern Warfare?

If you're a real fan, you'd have already watched the trailer at least a dozen times, combing it for any inkling of information. That's what we did anyway. One of the things that struck us was not only the careful attention to detail of the game's new engine, but the additional care taken in portraying military folks as they are.

One scene, just a few moments into the trailer, shows a team preparing for a raid on what appears to be a civilian home. Not a first-person or over the shoulder shot, we instead watch through a camera mounted on one operative's helmet. This feels like another step closer to the realistic take that the creators of the game have dedicated themselves to. It also makes us wonder if the camera-feed or helmet-cam perspective will be featured in the game. Maybe just in the cutscenes, as if they were really truly captured in a real-to-life raid.

You may not have initially recognized who was speaking at the start of the trailer until we caught glimpse of the cigar and boonie hat. That's because old favorite Captain Price has a new voice in addition to his high-definition look. Billy Murray, of Eastenders fame, is no longer Captain Price. The character's new body double is Barry Sloane, chosen for having previously played United States Navy SEAL Joe "Bear" Graves in the History Channel's Six and conceivably for his impressive facial hair.

The new game made use of motion capture, so familiarity with prop weapons and the way special operators move was imperative for the part. Billy Murray's voice might have been up to the challenge, but perhaps not his 77-year-old joints. Art director Joel Emslie, whose hands helped to shape the original Price, gave his seal of approval on Sloane's portrayal in an interview with Gamesradar: "I did a photoshoot with him. I spent a day building his costume – I went to a prop house, ordered all the right shoes, found his hat size, it was hilarious. But the cool part was, he put everything on, got decked out with the mutton chops, and he walked out and he looked at me... and I kind of sat there. I had this weird look on my face I guess, and he said 'what's wrong?' And I said 'I've been working with this character for over a decade and it's the first time I've ever met Captain Price.'"

Call of Duty and games like it did much to educate civilians about the tactics, weapons, and gear that military members use in order to execute missions. Before playing, we thought a ghillie suit was something out of Harry Potter. Now we know that its actually a form of seriously effective camouflage often used in covert operations. And today we know that the new Call of Duty: Modern Warfare will feature ghillie suits once again.

In the trailer, as soldiers appear like spectres from the gloom, you might notice one guy (on the left) has the look of a swamp thing. This is because he's all ghillied up. Maybe this suggests the return of Simon "Ghost" Riley or at the very least some serious stealth missions that require the utmost secrecy. What is Capt. Price and the gang doing out there in the dark woods anyway? There's a lot more to find out that the trailer has yet to tell.