Call of Duty HQ: Unified Launcher, Explained

Modern Warfare 3 is set to mark a new beginning for the Call of Duty franchise, and one of the biggest ways it’s doing that is through expanding on Call of Duty HQ. This feature, which arrived in Modern Warfare 2 but has flown mostly under the radar, aims to bring the series together like never before.

There are currently more than 20+ Call of Duty games when counting the spin-offs and mobile entries, and Activision believes it’s time for CoD to stop being a grumpy teenager and clean up its metaphorical bedroom with the launch of MW3 and its accompanying Warzone makeover.

Call of Duty HQ Is A One-Stop Launcher

Call of Duty HQ is a hub that, starting with MW2 and Warzone, serves as a launcher for all of the future games. Players have seen the beginning of Activision making organization a high priority since Modern Warfare (2019) when Multiplayer, Spec Ops, and Warzone all got a section in the main menu of that title – a trend that continued in Cold War, Vanguard, and Modern Warfare 2, with their respective game modes.

Each of those games acted as quick access hubs of their own, but CoD HQ hopes to do all of that automatically, streamlining navigation and making it easier for players to jump between releases without having to hunt down games of the series’ past.

The developers expanded on this idea by combining both of the 2022 releases under the Call of Duty name for PC players earlier this year, and Modern Warfare 3 will be added to the same menu upon release.

How Call of Duty HQ Benefits Players

Call of Duty has been on a yearly release cycle since 2006. CoD 3 was the first game to arrive a year after its predecessor, and while that game has mostly fallen by the wayside in the annals of gaming history, a year later Infinity Ward scored big with the arrival of Modern Warfare and Activision never looked back.

The downside to having constant yearly releases is that players are constantly cycling out the old games, and it makes organizing things a bit of a headache. Even platforms like Steam don’t have a great answer to keeping your library in tip-top shape when the games aren’t installed anymore.

This feature makes it much smoother, to say, hop over into MW2 for for a couple of rounds of Search & Destroy while you wait for a member of your Warzone 2.0 squad to hop online. It’s not something that’s going to blow anyone away, but given that the CoD library will only continue to grow over the years, it’s a practical implementation that should helps fans tailor their own experience over the years.