Dynamic Operations trailer: what the frames show

Eighty-five seconds, read slowly

Trailers are built to be felt, not read, and this one does its job: rain over Hajin, a helicopter skimming a tower block, a missile launcher swinging round, and a squad running through a tank depot while the walls catch fire. Slow it down, though, and the art direction falls away and the interface starts talking. The deploy screen, the loadout screen and about twenty seconds of uncut gameplay with the full HUD showing are all in there, and between them they answer questions the Hajin deep dive left open. Everything below comes from the frames themselves. Where a single frame is the only evidence, we say so. The footage carries Activision's own label, game engine footage of a game in development, so treat any number as a snapshot and not a promise.

Dynamic Operations pays straight into the Bank

The deploy screen is the most informative frame in the trailer. Dynamic Operations is the starred option of three deployment types, and the description is unusually specific: every completed Dynamic Op rewards a Supply Drop of increasing rarity, and $10,000 to $20,000 in cash is deposited to your Bank immediately on completion. That last word matters. Cash that lands in the Bank on completion is cash you keep even if the exfil goes badly, which changes the arithmetic of a raid. The same screen shows a Bank of $225,200 out of $500K at player level 28. Our first read was that $500K is simply the Bank cap. The Progression trailer, published two days later, complicates that: its FOB screens show $95,250 and $100,000 out of $100K at player level 35. A bigger cap at a lower level means the cap is not tied to player level. Our read, and it is inference, is that FOB station upgrades raise it, since the Progression narration talks about levelling up stations to expand what they can do. No frame we have seen shows the upgrade itself.

FOB and progression guide →

The DMZ Orders: chapter Underground

Top left of the same screen sits DMZ Orders, page two, Chapter: Underground 1/2. Two orders are already ticked off, Eye in the Sky and Joyride, and the third reads: Place a Transmitter on Top of La Grande Vie in Songdo Wharf. La Grande Vie is the tallest tower in the city, so the chapter called Underground apparently ends on a rooftop, which is either a nice bit of irony or a sign that page two covers more ground than the name suggests.

The Hajin map, as the game labels it

The deploy map labels twelve places: 14th Political Prison, Chang-san Air Base, Cheongun Village, Deadtown, Cheonwang Peak Array, Mirae General Hospital, Haneul Nuclear Reactor, Imjin Farmland, NuriGO Mall, Mujin Pass, The Grid and Hajin River Heights. Songdo Wharf appears in the Order and not on the visible map, and Wolves Stadium sits outside the frame, as far as we can tell, rather than off the map. The surprise is Mujin Pass. The official Hajin breakdown listed it among the sixty-odd minor areas, yet here it carries a full label alongside the majors, so it may matter more for routing than we first assumed. The compass adds three sub-areas you will not find on the overview: Chang-san Air Base Bunker, Tank Depot and Cheongun Outskirts. Our full rundown, with threat bands, is in the Hajin map guide, and our interactive map puts the places where you can see them.

Hajin map: 13 POIs → Interactive Hajin map →

Lieutenant Bale and the Paid Intel loop

The uncut gameplay stretch follows one complete boss hunt, and it is the clearest look yet at how Lieutenants work. The side-ops panel reads Paid Intel: Reach Bale, then Paid Intel: Kill Bale, so the hunt starts with intel you have bought, which fits the Boss Board at the FOB. Find him, and a large red LIEUTENANT BALE banner fills the centre of the screen. Kill him, and SIDE OP COMPLETE appears with a reward (+500 in the frame), Bale's Dog Tag drops for pickup, and KILL CONFIRMED follows. Bale is the second Lieutenant we have seen named, after Gorani in the deep dive. The deep dive also warned that picking up a Lieutenant's dog tag case broadcasts your position, so that tag is a trophy with a tracker attached: grab it, then move.

FOB and progression guide →

Operations by name: Dead Man's Cache and Chemical Denial

Two operations appear on the objective line. Operation: Dead Man's Cache asks you to Collect the Encrypted Drive, and the frame shows an operator capturing a care package in the Cheongun Outskirts treeline, a CAPTURING bar followed by a prompt to hold and open it. Operation: Chemical Denial asks you to Investigate the Power Outage, and it runs underneath the Bale hunt in the Tank Depot, which suggests side ops and operations can stack in the same area. Stack them deliberately and one trip pays twice.

The loadout screen: Army SF Airborne, free kits and squad fill

Before deploy the menu shows Hajin, Dynamic Operations and Infil: Ground, so the infil type is chosen per run. The operator on display is Army SF Airborne with a Steel dog tag, the bottom rung of the dog tag ladder, and the buttons underneath are worth a second look: Ready Up, an Equip Free Loadout toggle, Edit Loadout, Edit Active Duty and a Squad Fill toggle. A free loadout option means a bad run does not have to bankrupt you, and squad fill means solo players can still deploy into a full team. The backpack grid on the right is a Basic Pack, so pack size looks to be gear and not a fixed allowance.

Dreadnought: a gun, a truck, or both

One cut lingers on a weapon blueprint called DREADNOUGHT, an LMG built with an SA Sentinel 30.4 inch barrel, SZ Helios Holo optic, Assault-L5 grip, ST V.1 Woodgrain stock and a 100 round box magazine. The Hajin deep dive lists a Dreadnought among the ground vehicles, so either the name is shared or one of the two is about to be renamed. We have only one frame for each, so we are leaving both on the list until the game settles it.

The HUD tells you where you are, in words

The gameplay frames confirm the HUD layout we mapped from earlier footage. The compass at the top prints your heading and your current place in plain text, W 261 Chang-san Air Base Bunker or S 203 Tank Depot. The THREAT bar sits top right on five segments with a hostiles killed count beneath it, the storm timer counts down under the minimap, the side ops stack on the left, and the armour plate prompt, kill toasts and headshot markers all land in the centre. This is where our own work comes in. Wing Mait reads the same pixels you see and speaks callouts, and a HUD that writes the location as a word, flags a Lieutenant in large red letters and announces each completed side op is about as friendly to a screen-reading assistant as a game gets. This trailer is the first official footage where all of that is legible at 1440p, which is the resolution most of our players run. The DMZ pack is in development, it has not been tested on a release build, and it is not approved by Activision.

Reading the DMZ HUD → MW4 DMZ hub →

What we still do not know

The trailer leaves plenty open. What raises the Bank cap, what the Supply Drop rarities actually contain, how Paid Intel is priced, and whether Dreadnought is a vehicle, a gun or both are all still open, and none of it is final while the footage says in development. The official Part 2 FOB guide has not appeared yet; our FOB and progression guide covers what the Progression trailer adds and will be updated when it does. Until then, eighty-five seconds is more than enough to plan a first night in Hajin: take the op, bank the cash, buy the intel, and do not stand still holding Bale's tag.

FOB and progression guide →