On September 1 the Modern Warfare 4 Open Beta was scheduled to end at 10:00 AM PT. Less than an hour before that, the studio posted that it was leaving the servers up until 10:00 PM PT and keeping double XP running to the end. This page had already gone live with the morning time in it, in three places. Twelve extra hours of the last public build before launch is not a rounding error, so it gets a correction on the record rather than a quiet edit.
Confirmed. The extension came from the Call of Duty studio account on X, which named the new 10:00 PM PT close and the double XP window in its own words, and IGN and GameSpot both carried it the same day with the same 12 hour figure. The Infinity Ward post-beta patch note entry, published the same day, describes wrapping up the beta that night rather than that morning. The correction here is to our page, not to any source.
What actually happened
- The close moved. September 1 at 10:00 AM PT became September 1 at 10:00 PM PT, a full 12 hour extension on the Open Beta.
- Double XP stayed on. The studio kept double progression XP and double weapon XP active through the extension, up to the moment the servers went down.
- The reason was grinding, not a fault. The stated reason was players still working through beta rewards and camos, not a server problem or a rollback.
- Nothing else moved. Launch is still October 23, and campaign early access for pre-orders is still October 16. The next time anyone touches MW4 multiplayer is launch day.
Why Hardcore SnD cares
The beta was the only public build between now and October 23. There is no test window left, no private match to fall back on, and no second pass at the maps. Every hour inside that window was scouting time, and a wrong close time on a page you read is a lost evening of it.
- A lost evening is a lost map. Twelve hours is enough to walk a full rotation on one map and time the bomb plants properly. Anyone who closed the game at 10:00 AM PT on our word gave that up.
- The final tuning pass was the one that mattered. The August 31 weapon changes landed near the end of the window, so late reps were the only reps run on numbers close to what the studio says it is carrying into launch.
- Seven weeks of no reps starts now. From here to October 23 there is nothing to test on. Whatever your crew logged in that window is the whole scouting report, which is exactly why the last hours of it were worth having.
A wrong time on a prep page costs reps you cannot get back.
What we got wrong
This page previously stated a September 1 close at 10:00 AM PT, in the lede, in the opening section, and in the confidence note. That was accurate against the beta page when we wrote it and stopped being accurate a few hours later, and we did not catch the extension until the next sweep. The correct window is August 28 at 10:00 AM PT through September 1 at 10:00 PM PT. Everything else the page said about the final tuning pass and the launch prep window still stands.
What is still not locked
None of this touches the launch build. There is still no published Ranked Play breakdown for MW4, no named Hardcore rule set, and no changelog for October 23. The studio has said it is still tuning time to kill, perk tiers, aim assist, and spawns, so the beta numbers are evidence and not a spec. What would settle any of it is a launch patch note or a Forward Operating Blog entry that names the shipped values, or a Ranked Play page that states the competitive settings.