14 DAY TRIAL // Activision, the owner of the Call of Duty franchise, has confirmed that the newest installment in the series, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3, will have full-pledged support for Valve's Steamworks suite of services.
Modern Warfare 3 is getting close to its release date in November, so Activision, together with the game's developers, Infinity Ward and Sledgehammer Games, is releasing new details about the title in order to keep fans interested in it.
After hearing about some new features yesterday, like folding scopes or 'smart' grenade launchers, the companies have now confirmed that Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 for the PC will have complete support for Valve's Steam digital distribution service as well as its Steamworks infrastructure.
This means that both digital and retail versions of Modern Warfare 3 need to be activated on Steam, and will use the service to download and apply patches, synchronize achievements and support extra features, like the dedicated servers which were already confirmed for the new first-person shooter earlier this month.
Support for extra services like Steam Cloud, which allows uploading the player's save game files online to Valve servers hasn't been mentioned, so it's still up in the air whether or not your Modern Warfare 3 game saves will be up in the cloud, at least for the moment.
Battlefield 3, the biggest competitor of the Activision game this fall, made quite a lot of waves a few weeks ago as Electronic Arts, its publisher, confirmed that it won't appear on Steam, being exclusive for its own Origin digital distribution service.
This stems from Valve's pretty restrictive terms regulating downloadable content, which mandates that they should be done only through Steam and not through in-game stores, for example. This already got Crysis 2 or Dragon Age 2 kicked off Steam earlier this year.
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 seemingly won't have this problem when it is released on November 8, for the PC, PlayStation 3, Xbox 360 and other platforms.