Modern Warfare 4's DMZ lets you pay to spawn in a helicopter - and that's a problem for the rest of us

Picture this: you've just scraped together enough to buy a used console, you fire up the new Call of Duty extraction mode, and you spawn on foot. The squad across the map arrives by helicopter. Not because they're better. Because they paid.

That's the detail buried in the latest DMZ progression trailer for Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4. Most of the video is about the between-match stuff at the Forward Operating Base - upgrading guns, unlocking operator skills, printing gear on a 3D printer. Fine, that's standard extraction-shooter housekeeping. But tucked in there are paid infil options: pay up and you drop into the zone in a jeep, a helicopter and so on, instead of hoofing it from the edge of the map like everyone else.

In an extraction shooter that is not cosmetic. Getting to the good loot first, getting out before the lobby wakes up, skipping the open-field death march - that's the whole game. Eurogamer's take is that it hands rich players an enormous advantage over poor ones, and I don't think that's exaggerating.

Now, the important caveat: from what's been shown, you pay with the money you bring back from raids, not with euros. And I'm fine with in-game economies rewarding people who extract well. The problem is what this does to the shape of a match. The player who's ahead gets a helicopter to stay ahead. The player who got wiped twice walks in and gets farmed by the one who didn't. That's a snowball mechanic sold as a feature.

And I'll be honest about why I'm nervous. Call of Duty has a decade of history turning "earned in-game" into "or buy a bundle". Nobody has said the wallet can be topped up with real money, and I'm not claiming it can. But if you build a system where cash equals a better spawn, the bridge to the store is already half-built. We've watched this movie.

For players in our region this stings a bit more. Modern Warfare 4 lands at full price here, and a lot of people will be playing it on a shared console, a few evenings a week. Those are exactly the players who won't have a fat wallet in DMZ and will keep spawning on foot. The mode people were excited about because it was free of pay-to-win vibes now has a vehicle rank you have to buy into.

I'll wait to see how the costs land when the game is actually out later this month before I call it broken. But the first thing I'll check isn't the gunplay. It's how many games it takes a normal player to afford a ride.

Image: U.S. Marine Corps photo by Cpl. Jackson Kirkiewicz / Public domain, source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:U_S_Marines_Conduct_Helicopter_Support_Team_Resupply_with_Finnish_Soldiers_(7486560).jpg