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Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4’s Beta Has Already Given Captain Price a Bald Problem

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 has officially begun its beta, and PC players have found that Captain Price’s hair is almost impossible to see at the lowest graphics setting. Activision and Infinity Ward have acknowledged the issue in the official Trello board’s “Known Issues” section. The second open test for all players will run from August 28 to September 1, with the full release scheduled for October 23, 2026.

At the lowest LOD setting, the game is aggressively cutting visual information to improve performance. The game still needs to preserve enough detail for characters and weapons to remain readable. Price’s hair does not. The result is a visibly bald version of one of the series’ most recognizable characters, which makes players’ jokes that the setting has “ruined our good buddy” seem less far-fetched.

The bug is cosmetic, but it points to a broader presentation problem: the lowest LOD setting is cutting too much character detail in the name of performance. Activision and Infinity Ward have promised to fix the hair-rendering problem in a future update, but the Beta has exposed several issues that are also on the developers’ list: sharp frame-rate drops while charging throwables, stuttering during the first match for PC players, and a loadout screen that can lock up.

For a competitive shooter, hair rendering is less important than whether the time to kill, spawn points, and matches remain stable. The development team has already added TTK and spawn-point behavior to its follow-up optimization list, showing that TTK and spawn points remain areas of focus. Those problems can affect a match far more directly than a missing hair model.

PC players planning to join the next test should check whether the developers have addressed the first-match stutter, loadout lockups, and throwable-related frame-rate drops. If those basic stability problems remain unresolved, waiting for updates to the full release may be wiser than spending time on it immediately. The beta has not pointed to a disaster, but it has revealed at least 9 reasons to treat the next test as a check on the game’s stability rather than a final verdict.