Modern Warfare 2’ And Warzone 2’s Gunsmith Let’s You Level Up Guns In A Totally New Way

When Infinity Ward introduced the novel Gunsmith system in Call Of Duty: Modern Warfare back in 2019, it completely changed the way the shooter franchise handled its arsenal, giving players far more control over how they customized each of their guns.

This system was ported into Warzone as well as Black Ops Cold War and Vanguard, but it all started with Modern Warfare and now it’s getting its first major overhaul with Modern Warfare II.

The new Gunsmith 2.0 is more customizable than the original template, and operates in many ways like a tech tree. Rather than limit Gunsmith customization to individual guns, players can now unlock and customize weapons across Weapon Platforms. Infinity Ward breaks it down into three bullet points:

• Weapons Platforms. Grow and upgrade a weapon far beyond its class to truly customize your loadout. Evolve your weapon platform from an assault rifle to an SMG, DMR, and/or LMG by swapping Receivers on a specific platform, using a full suite of attachments to support your weapon’s role.
• Progression Overhaul. Thanks to Weapons Platforms and branching progression, attachments are shared within and between Weapons Platforms. Depending on the attachment, it is either unlocked for all weapons within a Platform, or unlocked for ALL weapons in the entire game. Expect reduced repetitiveness and reasonable challenges to unlock attachments and camouflage… And if you crave a journey towards Mastery, don’t worry: we have that planned, too.
• Firing Range. Test your creation without sacrificing K/D within the Gunsmith. More intel to come at Call of Duty: Next.

Infinity Ward uses the example of the Tempus Armament Weapons Platform which is the first you can unlock in the game. The Platform includes an M4, M16, 556 Icarus, FTAC Recon, and FSS Hurricane. All Tempus Armament Platform attachments are unlocked and shared across all of these weapons, so if you unlock an attachment using the M4 that same attachment can be used with the M16 as well.

This means that playing with an Assault Rifle can still help you unlock attachments for your Tactical Rifle or SMG, giving you a bit more flexibility not just in customization but in playstyle as well.

What this also allows you to do is swap out all your selected attachments between each weapon in the Platform at will—retaining your attachments between the M4, M16, 556 Icarus etc. without having to redo any Gunsmith tinkering.

In the image below you can see how this looks in action. Simply swapping what’s called a Receiver in Gunsmith allows you to swap between all five guns while retaining all the attachments:

There are two types of attachments you can now unlock as you level up your arsenal:

“The first is for the specific Weapons Platform – Receivers, Barrels, Stocks, Rear Grips, and Magazines. These are sharable within the Platform across all Receivers.

“The second are attachments that can be used across ALL weapons that are able to equip them. These are Optics, Ammunition, Underbarrels and Foregrips, and Muzzles. This lets allows you to collect an arsenal of attachments that only need to be unlocked once.”

Infinity Ward notes that when you level up the M4 to Weapon Level 1 and 2 you unlock the SZ Reflex Optic and the Echoline GS-X Suppressor Muzzle attachment. Once these are unlocked via the M4 you can now attach them to any weapon in the game. Instead of unlocking these on dozens of different weapons, they only need to be unlocked once.

Instead, different weapons will level up different attachments, so you’ll still have a reason to level up each gun—it just won’t be to unlock the same attachment twice. This is more interesting and fun and gives a much wider array of customization options both within and outside of Weapon Platforms.

On top of all of this, there are Weapon Vaults—something you can get in the Vault Edition of the game and which we’ll undoubtedly see a lot of in the Item Shop. These allow you to customize your weapon with lots of different attachments that don’t change the aesthetic theme of the weapon. So even if you use an attachment that’s not part of the base Vault the weapon will retain its thematic appearance.

You can read more about these and Gunsmith 2.0 at the Call Of Duty blog.