Ever-grinning Infinity Ward president Grant Collier has put on his serious face. “Folks thought it would be Vietnam or Iraq, but nobody thought it would be a fictional conflict,” he explains while revealing a snazzy T-shirt printed with a smart Call of Duty 4 logo on the front and a battle scene on the back. “There’s sensitivity about the subject matter, but we don’t want people to misunderstand what we’re doing - it’s absolutely not about the war in Iraq…”

We’ve been invited to publisher Activision’s UK HQ for the exclusive first look at the new Infinity Ward shooter - Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare. We’re just about to find out the closely-guarded secret setting of the new game, and you could say that we’re a teensy bit excited.

“We really wanted to craft an enemy that would give the Western powers a stand-up fight,” continues Collier. “CoD for us is two sides with different advantages pitted against each other, but very evenly matched. A lot of the modern battles are very one-sided, so one team comes in and annihilates the other guy, then it’s just insurgencies and mopping up - stuff that really isn’t Call of Duty and doesn’t make for a fun game.”