Morning Save Point: MW4’s 84, Wolverine Tops September PS5 Downloads

Call of Duty got its mojo back overnight while the rest of the week tidied up behind it. Modern Warfare 4 launched on October 23 as a standalone release with a generally favorable 84 on Metacritic, Marvel’s Wolverine quietly owned PlayStation’s September chart, and the two biggest industry stories of October 22 were EA closing BioWare and an 11.7 million account breach at Capcom ID. Here’s the short version.

The big one

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 is live worldwide, and the reviews that came with it are the best in the series in years. GamesIndustry.biz’s consensus roundup puts MW4 at a generally favorable 84 on Metacritic. The Guardian’s Keith Stuart gave it 4 out of 5 and called it “a bombastic, thrilling airport novel of a game,” Game Informer’s Michael Murphy gave it 8.5 out of 10, and Nintendo Life’s Gavin Lane gave the Switch 2 version a 9, noting it is the first Call of Duty on a Nintendo console since 2013. The praise piled up deepest on DMZ, the new extraction mode. The most common complaint was the roughly six-hour campaign feeling short next to the multiplayer suite.

Activision has been clear about the commercial shape of it. MW4 is a standalone purchase, it is not in Game Pass at launch, and Activision says it won’t join Game Pass until Holiday 2027. Campaign early access opened for digital pre-orders on October 16 and DMZ early access on October 20, so anyone who pre-ordered has had the game for a week already. Our Steam player tracker has the Call of Duty app sitting at 129,516 concurrent players after a 139,638 peak in the last 24 hours, up 507% on the 23,001 it peaked at a week earlier and the highest reading we’ve recorded since we started tracking it on October 11. If you’re still on the fence, our MW4 launch guide has the 11 mistakes worth skipping, and our Switch 2 guide covers the 30fps campaign, the framerate multiplayer aims for and crossplay.

The score matters less than the shape of the launch. Activision kept MW4 out of Game Pass, opened the campaign and DMZ to pre-orders early, and got its review cycle to land on a 139,638-player peak in our tracked Steam data to sell against, which leaves subscribers waiting and everyone else paying up front. With GTA 6 arriving November 19, the number worth watching this weekend isn’t the Metacritic score, it’s whether that peak holds or climbs, and whether DMZ keeps players after the credits roll.

Also happening

• Marvel’s Wolverine topped September’s US PS5 download chart. PlayStation’s own monthly list puts Wolverine first in the US and second in the EU, where EA Sports FC 27 took the top spot. FC 27 was No. 2 in the US, with NBA 2K27 at No. 3.
• Shigeru Miyamoto is the first game developer to receive Japan’s Order of Culture. Automaton reports that Nintendo announced at a press conference in Kyoto on October 22 that Miyamoto, the company’s Representative Director and Creative Fellow, is one of eight recipients this year in the Media Arts (Gaming) field. The Emperor hands the award over on Culture Day, November 3.
• Final Fantasy 14 still won’t let anyone in. Logins have been suspended since October 21 over a flaw in PHP, and there’s no sign of the gate lifting. We reported it this morning.
• EA closed BioWare. The studio behind Mass Effect and Dragon Age is gone, with about 400 jobs cut. The open question is what happens to Mass Effect 5.
• The Capcom ID breach hit 11.7 million accounts. Here’s what we know, and if you reused that email and password anywhere else, change it.
• Cult of the Lamb landed on Switch 2, and Switch 1 owners get a free update. Devolver Digital confirmed the Switch 2 release with a free patch for existing owners; we have the port covered.

Out today

Modern Warfare 4 is out on PS5, Xbox, PC and Switch 2, with every weapon and operator unlock listed here. ONE PIECE: Grand Gourmet, Kairosoft’s restaurant sim where you feed the Straw Hat Crew, is available now on Switch, Switch 2, PC, iOS and Android per Bandai Namco’s release. Steam lists the PC build at $19.99 with an October 22 date, and series creator Eiichiro Oda says in the release that he asked to play it and was told no. Warrior Cats: Clans of the Forest, from Bamtang Games and published by Trailmark Games, is listed on Steam for October 23. October 22 was busier: Final Fantasy Resonance landed, and the reviews are in, alongside PEAK on consoles and Hitman: Absolution on Switch 2. Our Release Radar for the week has the full list.

Deal of the day

Cyberpunk 2077 is $17.99 on Steam, 70% off, until Monday, October 26 at 1 PM Central. Phantom Liberty is $17.99 too, 40% off, with the same end time. Our tracker has Cyberpunk at a 91,407 Steam peak in the last 24 hours, close to double the 47,015 it hit a week earlier. Also free: Sker Ritual and Home are free on Epic through October 29.

One more thing

Lara Croft hit 30 this year, and PlayStation marked it the only way it knows how: a blog post walking through Lara’s design evolution, topped with a wallpaper that lays three decades of her side by side, from the few hundred polygons of 1996 to Tomb Raider: Legacy of Atlantis. If you bought the original on a retail CD, that wallpaper is a genuine trip.

Edited by Kerwin Stewart, Editor-in-Chief · How we report