Call of Duty®: Modern Warfare® 4 Weapons guide

Call of Duty®: Modern Warfare® 4 launches on Steam on Oct 22, 2026 at $69.99. Campaign early access opened October 16; DMZ early access opens October 20. Last verified 2026-10-16.

Why this page has no table yet

Steam’s store copy advertises a weapon blueprint unlock for pre-purchase, which confirms weapon progression exists. It publishes no numbers.

Damage, time-to-kill, recoil and fire rate can only be measured once the game is playable. Writing them now would mean guessing, and a wiki that guesses is worse than a wiki that waits.

What gets measured here

Base damage per shot and per magazine
Time-to-kill across every range bracket
Recoil pattern and first-shot accuracy
Blueprint unlock paths and material costs
Attachment stat deltas

Every figure on this page carries the patch version it was measured on.

A weapon shouldered in low light — the frame weapon tables are measured against — Weapon behaviour at close range, where most fights are decided Screenshot © Activision / Infinity Ward, via Steam. Used for editorial commentary; not an endorsement.

An operator firing a rifle amid flying debris — Recoil and damage matter most when the target is close Screenshot © Activision / Infinity Ward, via Steam. Used for editorial commentary; not an endorsement.

Why weapon data is the hardest thing to get right early

Weapon statistics are the single most searched category in Call of Duty, and also the single easiest to get wrong before launch. Damage numbers, time-to-kill, range falloff and fire rates all interact multiplicatively — a rifle with two more damage per bullet and a slower fire rate can have identical TTK to one with less damage and a faster rate. Publishing isolated figures without that context produces pages that are confidently wrong.

So this page will not guess. It records what is structurally confirmed, and it explains the concepts you need in order to read a weapon page competently once real numbers land.

The three weapons categories in Modern Warfare 4

Call of Duty’s loadout system has been stable across recent titles, and Modern Warfare 4 keeps the same shape:

Assault rifles — the generalist. Balanced damage, range and mobility. Every loadout needs one.
SMGs — high rate of fire, low per-shot damage, steep damage falloff. Close quarters.
Shotguns — pellet-based, brutal inside about ten metres, near-useless past twenty.

Beyond those, the store copy for Modern Warfare 4 references weapon blueprints, a progression layer layered over the base arsenal. Blueprints change what a weapon can become across a match; they do not change the weapon’s identity. Treat blueprint claims with the same scepticism as base-stat claims until the game is playable.

How to read a weapon page when the numbers arrive

Once real data exists, three numbers matter more than the rest:

Stat	Why it matters
Damage per bullet	Sets the floor of a burst; interacts with fire rate
Rounds per minute	Sets the length of that burst
Damage falloff range	Decides where a weapon stops being good

Time-to-kill falls out of the first two. Effective range falls out of the third. A page that shows all three together is trustworthy; a page that shows one alone is not.

What changes first after launch

Weapon balance in a launch title is not final. The first two patches after release typically move damage and range bands on a handful of weapons without touching the meta’s overall shape. Anything this page says about balance is therefore provisional, and the specific figures are what we will be correcting first as real tests arrive.

The release schedule this page follows

Three dates govern what is verifiable about Modern Warfare 4, and this page updates against all three:

Date	Milestone	What becomes verifiable
Oct 16, 2026	Campaign early access	Campaign content goes live
Oct 20, 2026	DMZ early access	DMZ content goes live
Oct 22, 2026	Full launch ($69.99)	Everything else unlocks

Anything published before the relevant date is a prediction, not a fact. This wiki marks it as one.

What this page will not tell you

Modern Warfare 4 ships Oct 22, 2026 and this page is written ahead of it. That creates an obvious temptation to fill the gap with plausible-sounding numbers, and it is a trap: wrong numbers that look authoritative are worse than an honest gap, because readers cannot tell which are which.

So the rule here is simple. Every figure and every name on this page is quoted from Activision, from the Steam store listing, or from the published schedule. Where something is genuinely unknown, this page says “not published yet” rather than estimating. When the game ships, these entries get replaced with the real thing.

Browse this wiki

Maps · Operators · DMZ · Game modes · Campaign