Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 doesn’t even launch fully until October 23, but one of the hardest challenges in this year’s game has already been beaten.
Exhibiting truly heroic levels of degeneracy, the first players have cleared the hardest difficulty setting in the campaign and unlocked their reward. Not realism, of course; this year we’ve got YOLO.
The reward is a Calling Card that you’re definitely not going to see all that many players showing off because of how difficult it is to acquire. And also you can’t show it off until at least DMZ early access begins on October 20. If you don’t know why this is so hard, let me set out the path you have to take.
- Beat the campaign
- Beat the campaign again on Realism to unlock YOLO.
- Beat the campaign with one life to unlock the Calling Card.
So you have to beat the campaign twice before you can even begin, because Realism difficulty isn’t available until you’ve done one completion. At least it doesn’t seem to matter which difficulty you do first to get the Realism unlock.
I’ve done my traditional first run on Regular to get it done quickly and get cracking with the achievements, and I’ve got Realism waiting to destroy me.
YOLO is a permadeath mode on Realism difficulty. You get one life. If you go down, your run is over, and you go back to the very beginning of the campaign. It is brutal. And yet we’re already seeing the first players having completed it. Presumably they haven’t slept much since Friday.
There is an apparent ‘cheese’ some folks have suggested works, which involves quickly restarting the current mission from the menu if it looks like you’re about to go down. But I’ve also seen people say that you can’t save and quit and do it over multiple sessions, because it warns you that you’ll lose your progress.
Others have said they’ve been able to quit just fine and come back. If you know for sure, do please put it in the comments below, because who knows what’s real on the internet these days.
The apparent Calling Card reward can be seen here, though since the Calling Card collection doesn’t go live until DMZ early access, it could also be a troll. We’ll soon know.
If you see this Calling Card pop up in one of your lobbies, though, know what you’re dealing with. A player who doesn’t sleep. Or a hacker. Either way, probably run the opposite direction.
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