Over the preceding hour, members of the development team beamed with pride and spoke with enthusiasm as they described the game they’d spent the last few years making. The only problem is that it sounded like the group was talking about two different games.

This was the clearest takeaway I could find while sitting in a dark theater after a long presentation about Infinity Ward’s reboot of the FPS franchise, which is due this October 25 on PS4, Xbox One, and PC, and which I got to see during a press event earlier this month.

The first pitch came from Jacob Minkoff (Campaign Gameplay Director) and Taylor Kurosaki (Studio Narrative Director), both of whom spent time at Naughty Dog, developers of The Last of Us and the Uncharted series. It’s a pedigree that, we’re told, makes them perfect for rebooting Modern Warfare with a greater focus on story than ever before. They were bringing a new vision to the series, one that captured the best elements of past series entries while also introducing a fresh perspective never seen in a Modern Warfare game before.

Maybe there’s a version of this pitch that blends the two well. Maybe instead of describing the violence as “visceral” and leaving it there, you wrap back around to your narrative and thematic aims, and tie the two together. Maybe you spin out some bullet points about how the echo of gun fire helps to produce a sense of vulnerability for players. But that isn’t the pitch I saw. Instead, I got a look at one game that may as well be two.

Which left me with questions: Is this new Modern Warfare aiming to be an intense exploration of the complexity of war, or does it instead want to celebrate the technologies, tactics, and violence of combat? Does the development team hope to make players feel uncomfortable with the power they have at their disposal, or should we luxuriate in their capacity for destruction (rendered in higher audio-visual fidelity than ever before)?

Here’s their pitch in brief and in as close to their own words as I can provide, without my own editorializing: Yes, Modern Warfare is an action game, but in contrast to the superheroics of other Call of Duty titles, it will have a focus on “authentic and gritty” military action. It’s also an action game that will draw from “relevant headline situations” and will include “social commentary,” which “has always been part of Modern Warfare’s DNA,” gesturing to past, headline-grabbing levels like “No Russian.”

As a sprawl of bullet points and marketing phrases, it wasn’t a very effective pitch. The team’s ambition was clear, but their sell seemed confused and contradictory, perhaps most importantly around the idea that “war has changed.” Certainly, mainstream American perspectives on war have changed since the start of the forever war—a term that has now been in use for over a decade , describing the interminable “war on terror” that has left American military forces deployed in Iraq and elsewhere in the Middle East for so long that next year, people born the year this war began will be able to vote for president. Which is to say that we call it the forever war for a reason, and a change in opinion is not a change in the realities of war, especially for those living “over there.”

And under all of it: Characters. People we could care about. Whether they were returning favorites like SAS soldier Captain Price or new ones, like rebel commander Farah Karim, “characters are the stars” of Modern Warfare.

What sort of social commentary? Well, war, they say, is “more complex than it was 10 years ago.” It’s “no longer only over there, it’s global,” and “it isn’t black and white. It’s morally gray.” Enemies “rarely wear uniforms,” and violence on all sides causes “terrible collateral damage.” In this “tough to navigate world,” “one man’s freedom fighter is another’s terrorist.” Which is why, for the first time, players will take the role not only of Tier 1 special forces operators, but also “rebels” in an (unnamed) Middle Eastern nation who fight both occupying terrorist forces and “military-industrial” invaders.

After their long preamble, the game’s narrative leads introduced the first gameplay for us. In the aftermath of a terrorist bombing, a British SAS team, prepared to storm a four story residential building housing a terrorist cell. In green-and-white night vision, the player moved towards the building, latched a grappling hook to the roof, and climbed up to a second-story window, quietly entered, and moved towards a closed door. Behind it, a man and a woman were debating something with fear in their voices. Before they could agree, the theater took in a collective breath, and the special ops team breached the room, not with perfect precision, but with an uncomfortable mix of confusion and power.

I’ve seen dozens of levels just like this. Hundreds, maybe. But I’ve never seen a game lean so strongly into the ambiguity of this sort of police or military action. It’s not only that you don’t know what’s behind a given door, it’s that the people behind those doors actually read, visually, as human. Partly, that’s to do with the blurriness of night vision, but it’s also because of a focus on animation, character design and fashion, and voice work. When one character offered to surrender, only to be gunned down by a player already mid-motion, the whole room emotionally deflated.