Call of Duty Games in Order (Modern Warfare & Black Ops)

Why this order?

Call of Duty ships a new game almost every year, but the campaigns that actually connect to one another live in two big sub-series: Modern Warfare and Black Ops. This page follows those narrative threads rather than cataloguing every annual release, so you can play the stories that build on each other instead of bouncing between unrelated standalone entries.

The single biggest source of confusion is that the Modern Warfare name was used twice. The original trilogy — Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare (2007), Modern Warfare 2 (2009) and Modern Warfare 3 (2011) — tells one complete story about Captain Price, Soap and the hunt for the terrorist Makarov. Then in 2019 the series rebooted the brand from scratch: Modern Warfare (2019), Modern Warfare II (2022) and Modern Warfare III (2023) reuse the names and many of the characters but unfold in a separate, modernized continuity. They are not remakes you play in sequence with the originals, which is why each carries its own entry and a clarifying qualifier.

Release order is our default because these games were built to be experienced as they shipped, and the reboot deliberately echoes the originals years later. Within that timeline, treat the original Modern Warfare trilogy as one block, the reboot trilogy as another, and Black Ops as a third connected sub-series running from Black Ops (2010) through Black Ops II and III, Cold War and Black Ops 6 (2024).

Black Ops stands largely apart, weaving Cold War espionage and the tangled loyalties of Mason, Woods and Menendez across decades. Beyond these two pillars sit plenty of standalone entries — World at War, WWII, Ghosts, Infinite Warfare, Vanguard and others — but none are required to follow either main arc. If you only want the stories that matter, pick one sub-series and play it straight through.