MW4 All Maps: The Full Launch Lineup Explained

Modern Warfare 4's launch board is 20 named multiplayer battlegrounds: 12 core 6v6 maps, four dedicated Gunfight arenas, three Ground War maps and Kill Block, which is not really a map so much as a map generator. That is what you get on Friday 23 October.

The thing to internalise before launch is what is not on that board. Shipment is not in the launch pool. It arrives on Tuesday 27 October, four days later, which means the first weekend's grind happens on real maps with real sightlines rather than in a shipping container. If your levelling plan involves Shipment, it needs a Plan A for the opening weekend.

Here is the complete lineup, where each map is set, and what the beta actually told us about them.

The launch lineup, counted properly

Infinity Ward's 14 October roadmap graphic lays the whole thing out, and the arithmetic is worth doing because "20 maps" gets quoted without the breakdown. Twelve maps carry no mode tag - those are the core 6v6 pool. Three are tagged Ground War. Four are tagged Gunfight. Kill Block sits on its own as the large tile.

Thirteen modes launch alongside them: Hijack, Inflation, Collateral and Ground War: Combat Outpost are new, joined by Frontline, Hardpoint, Search and Destroy, Kill Confirmed, Domination, Team Deathmatch, Free-For-All, Gun Game and Gunfight. Three modes named back in August - Counter Attack, Gunfight 10v10 and Drop Zone - do not appear on the October graphic, and Activision has not explained the omission.

The 12 core 6v6 maps and where they are set

MW4's core pool is more geographically coherent than recent Call of Duty years. The campaign is anchored on a Korean conflict, and six of the twelve maps sit on the peninsula. The rest spread across France, Mexico, India, New York and a decommissioned Soviet coal plant.

MW4 launch maps by mode, with settings from the official descriptions

Map	Mode pool	Setting
Cachette	Core 6v6	Outskirts of a French rail terminal
Coal	Core 6v6	Old Soviet coal processing plant in a remote, mountainous area
Lithium	Core 6v6	Rural Mexican state beneath the Sierra mountains
Lotus	Core 6v6	A Korean fishing village
Mumbai	Core 6v6	A fugitive's hideout in a dense residential district around a Victorian market, India
Munition	Core 6v6	An active North Korean command facility
Nautical	Core 6v6	A South Korean ferry leaving a conflict zone at dawn
Reactor U92	Core 6v6	A Korean reactor complex that has gone nuclear
Rooftops	Core 6v6	Snow-lined rooftops of New York's Hotel Times West
Sentry	Core 6v6	Assault on a North Korean military base in whiteout conditions
Silkworm	Core 6v6	A dense, urban South Korean shopping district
Transit 213	Core 6v6	An overgrown central parking lot in western India
Smuggler	Gunfight	Not detailed
NYC	Gunfight	Not detailed
Cafe	Gunfight	Not detailed
Library	Gunfight	Not detailed
Wolves Stadium	Ground War	Set in Hajin, the campaign's DMZ region
Forest	Ground War	Not detailed
Imjin Farmland	Ground War	Set in Hajin
Kill Block	Gunfight 3v3 and 10v10	The Westbridge training facility, reconfigured every match

A note on map sizes: Activision has not published size classifications for the core pool, and the small/medium/large labels you will find on other sites are third-party judgements from beta footage. The one consistent read is that Transit 213 is the small, high-tempo three-lane map of the set - the closest thing to a spawn-flip XP map in the launch pool, and the obvious Shipment substitute until the 27th.

Cachette, not Cashette

Worth settling because it is all over search results. The official spelling is Cachette - French for "hiding place", which fits a map set on the outskirts of a French rail terminal. "Cashette" appears in a handful of third-party roundups and is simply a misspelling, not an alternate name or a rename. Search for the wrong one and you will find less than half the coverage.

Cachette earned the most praise of any beta map for its layered design - cobblestone streets, containers, garages, rooftops and compact interiors giving several routes onto an objective - and the most consistent criticism for spawn trapping. Infinity Ward collects data between beta weekends and has historically patched spawn logic before launch, so the beta spawns are not necessarily the launch spawns.

Kill Block: the map that is never the same twice

Kill Block is the genuinely new idea in the launch lineup. It is the Westbridge training facility, and its layout is reconfigured before every match from a set of modular pieces Activision calls Slabs. More than 500 possible configurations, with individual slabs echoing Crash, Highrise and Shoot House. Its overall footprint is roughly comparable to Shoot House from 2019's Modern Warfare.

It is the Gunfight home, running 3v3 and the new 10v10 variant, where every player gets the same randomised loadout each round. That combination - a layout you cannot pre-learn plus a gun you did not pick - is a deliberate attack on map knowledge as a crutch, and it is the one part of the launch pool nobody can hand you a routes guide for.

One point where the sourcing is muddled: the roadmap lists four separate Gunfight arenas - Smuggler, NYC, Cafe and Library - while the official map descriptions call Kill Block "the Westbridge training facility where Gunfight is played" in 3v3 and 10v10. Those are not obviously compatible. The most likely reading is that the four named arenas are standard Gunfight maps and Kill Block is the modular mode-within-a-mode, but that is inference and Activision has not clarified it.

Ground War: Combat Outpost and the three large maps

Ground War returns as Ground War: Combat Outpost, a new variant, across Wolves Stadium, Forest and Imjin Farmland. Two of those - Wolves Stadium and Imjin Farmland - are described as being set in Hajin, the Korea-set region that also serves as the campaign's DMZ map, with the large-scale battlegrounds built from points of interest inside it.

That reuse is a sensible call rather than a corner cut: it means the Ground War maps are places you will already know from DMZ, and vice versa. Forest has no published setting detail at all. None of the three has a published player count or size figure, so anyone quoting a 32v32 or 64-player number for MW4 is extrapolating from previous years.

Shipment arrives on 27 October, and that changes your first weekend

Shipment is confirmed for Tuesday 27 October on the official roadmap, tagged "Coming Soon". No time of day was given. It is not in the 23 October pool, and this is the single most consequential scheduling detail for anyone planning to grind.

Practically, it means the launch weekend's fastest XP comes from map and mode selection rather than from one box. Transit 213 is the small map; Hardpoint and Domination on the medium maps are the reliable objective-XP earners; Gun Game and Free-For-All are not. If your plan was Shipment 24/7 from Friday night, our guide to levelling fast in MW4 covers what actually works in the four-day gap.

The same gap matters for camo grinding. Weapon camo challenges in the close-range SMG class are substantially harder on Mumbai and Coal than they would be on Shipment, so there is a real argument for grinding ARs first and saving the shotgun and SMG work until the 27th.

What the beta told us, and what it did not

Six of the twelve core maps ran in the August beta: Cachette, Lithium, Lotus, Rooftops, Silkworm and Transit 213. That is half the launch pool with real public data behind it, and half with nothing but official descriptions and trailer footage.

The loudest beta complaint was map size - a recurring argument that the pool skewed too small and too spawn-flippy. That was six maps out of twelve, and the two the official descriptions suggest are largest, Coal and Mumbai, were not among them. Judging the launch pool's pacing on the beta sample is premature.

Two things to be sceptical about in pre-launch map content. Detailed route and callout guides for the Gunfight arenas do not exist yet, because nobody has played them - their layouts are unannounced. And Zodiac, which shows up in some map lists, is a Warzone Resurgence map, not a 6v6 core map. It was in the beta's Warzone playlist and is not part of the 20.

Beyond that, the sensible move is to pick two or three maps you genuinely like and learn them properly rather than spreading thin across twelve. Pair that with sane MW4 settings and a weapon from the current meta read and you will be ahead of most of the lobby by the weekend. If you would rather arrive with the account work already done, our Modern Warfare 4 services handle that side; the map knowledge is still on you. And the full launch timetable has the exact unlock windows for everything above.

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