Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 | Multiplayer and DMZ Interview with Infinity

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Győző "FairyEmpire" Baki

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As you may have heard by now, we spent 3 days at Infinity Ward in Los Angeles, playing through everything the latest Call of Duty has to offer before its release date. We also sat down with Joe Cecot, Multiplayer Creative Director and Jackie Reynolds, Lead Game Designer for Multiplayer at Infinity Ward. We chatted about that infamous weekend 1 beta, the expectations for the community DMZ will create and more. Let’s go!

This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.

Győző: I’d really like to know what happened between weekend one and weekend two of the beta. There were so many changes, what led to that? I don’t think Call of Duty has ever done such a massive overhaul.

Joe: It was by far the most beta changes we’ve made. We have worked on this game for years. We polished it, and really tried to find how the tactical game meets the fluid shooter and how does that land? We brought in user testing of players of all different skills. We brought in CDL players, we brought in influencers, brought in Warzone players, core MP players, and we really tried to hit that. The beta is the first time I think we really got millions of players in to play and get their feedback. And we ran surveys at the end.

When we finished weekend one, our studio head, Jack O’Hara (author’s note: Co-Studio Head at Infinity Ward), was like, hey, I want to take a big swing. I want to really look at time to kill. I want to nudge it up a little bit. I want to make the fights have a little bit more durability to them, and I want players to be a little bit more survivable. When you ask what happened next, as soon as the weekend wrapped, every night through the whole week, every day and night, we played two playtests with two different builds with iterations between them, so that we could find what the right tuning was, so we could take some big swings on durability. We didn’t necessarily just plump health, because really at the end of the day, it’s bullets to kill, it’s weapon feel, it’s scalers on different locational damage. We have Apex attachments that all have their own tuning. We have attachments that modify tuning on top.

It was a Herculean effort from the weapons team, and then we had people from VFX, from animation, from UI, the studio had everyone there playing and we would play and play, and we’d stand up and we’d give our feedback and then we’d do iteration and we must have done a month’s worth of iteration in a week so that we were ready for that next weekend so that we could be like, you know what, we’re going to try something hard.

Győző: That’s the surprising part to me, because I think there’s been a lot of Call of Duty betas throughout the years. Some of them had an excellent reception from the start, like everyone loved everything, and there have been a couple others that have been a bit more controversial, and yet there’s never been such a change. Is there anything special, or different that happened this time?

Joe: Not to say anything about previous leadership, but we have new leadership in the studio. We also had Modern Warfare in a very, very good place. We were ready to do iteration like that. Our build and our game, we had hit a point with multiplayer where development wise, six months before we were going to ship even, we had no more new content, no more anything. We were refining, polishing, testing. We had already gone through a bunch of revs. We had already built that muscle. We were ready to make some big swings. With that direction and with that preparedness, we were ready to try some things. We also were ready with surveys and other things so we could measure that. We got to see the convergence of the people really enjoying the changes that we made. So I think it’s a combination of those things, right? It’s experience. And we said it previously, there’s so many different kinds of Call of Duty players now – between Warzone players and Black Ops 7 players and Modern Warfare players.

So when the franchise has tried a lot of different things, we’re trying to figure out how to make a fluid, yet grounded, yet modern Modern Warfare game. That’s a big challenge for us, and we’re trying to thread that needle where we want that fluid player to feel like they found the game for them, but we want the tactical player to feel like they found the game for them and that’s not easy to do. I think it’s all of those things combined. It’s experience, it’s preparedness.

Győző: Did all the changes you made impact the map design and other design choices?

Joe: Definitely. As soon as you increase the time to kill for fully automatic weapons, the one hit weapons become more powerful – your snipers, your shotguns. Then you need to look at flinch and other things like that. You want to try and make sure that it feels balanced, that it feels good.

So we kept having this ripple effect, like you touch this knob, the butterfly wings change and all these other things get affected. Map design wise, I think we were okay because we didn’t increase the max speed of players. All we did is say, ‘hey, you’re gonna have to make some hard sacrifices between tactical sprinting or running really fast or being really quiet’, right? Those changes actually made the game a bit more healthy because now you weren’t going super fast and being super quiet. It actually pulled the overall pace down of the game a little bit. And the TTK increase also pulled the pace down a little bit because you couldn’t blow through two players as easily. If you got tagged at distance, you could step back in and stim. So it actually slowed the game down a bit.

We didn’t have to change the maps. We actually felt, this is making the game feel better. And we landed in a really good place with the tax sprint when you play today. I’m not a big fan of when a perk introduces a new movement mechanic that then has a new button input. So the way it’s implemented by default is that you just sprint and you go into tax sprint. There’s no extra penalty for it. We’re just running faster. And if you don’t have it, you just sprint, you go under the normal sprint. The player’s control between one class and the other is exactly the same. It’s just this one’s better for speed. This one’s better for stealth. This one’s better for durability. I think it just made the game healthier. It was nice for us to try it and then realize that it did make the game healthier.

Győző: I think the maps now feel somewhat closer to the symmetric nature of Treyarch maps, rather than the more organic designs of the previous Modern Warfare games. I reckon these maps feel closer to that sort of Treyarch design of symmetries, right? Not necessarily 3 lanes, but something closer to that. So would you agree? Was it a conscious design choice of making more lane-based maps?

Joe: So Jeff Smith‘s not here, Jeff Smith‘s the director, my co-director, and he manages the map side. Every game he works on, he kind of challenges his and his team’s philosophies. What experimentation could they do? How could they change their flow? In 2019, it was like, we’re going to have these 10v10 maps, and we’re going to have these 6v6 maps. And the 10v10 represents the bigger war, but we ended up doing Ground War. And then we had the 6v6 tier 1 tactical.

For this game, one of the big innovations was Kill Block, and we’ll talk about that after. But when you talk about the design of this game, towards the end of Modern Warfare II, there was a map, and I can’t remember the name, that was DRC themed. It was themed in the theme of Building 21 from DMZ. It was one of the last seasonal maps we launched. And it was him working to create a mold of what the maps would be like for this game. He was experimenting with removing cover and reducing the amount of freestanding buildings. We still have some, but there’s a little bit less. It was an attempt to streamline the gameplay a little bit so that there was less stress as you moved through the world. There were less windows and lines of sight to check. That’s where the philosophy came. It wasn’t like, oh, we want to make maps like Treyarch. It was more like, hey, can we have variety? Because I think depending what you played, Century is still pretty unique. RBMK is pretty unique.

Coal is pretty unique. But then Silkworm and some of those maps are a little bit more like ‘lane-y’. There was definitely a stripping back of complexity that was a goal of this project. A little bit less climbing up high. We still have power positions, but less climbing on stuff. And you can see that in the design of the maps this game. That’s where I think his philosophy came from. Let’s make it a little bit less stressful, less to manage as you move through it.

Jackie: I think the end result is an increased flow, and you feel like these engagements are a lot more intentional as you’re moving through the space. it lets you be more aggressive, which was something that we definitely wanted to lean into a little bit more as we were leading into that free play style a bit more.

Győző: My personal opinion that the first weekend of the beta was one of the worst flowing Call of Duty experiences I’ve played. It wasn’t terrible because at its core, Call of Duty plays well, but I think it had one of the worst flows. But by the second weekend, it was one of the best. That just absolutely blew my mind! I really want to understand how such a huge shift happened.

Joe: It’s a great point. We had people in the studio that were always having a Tac Sprint. And then when we took it away, they were like, oh yeah, that does feel better that we don’t always have that. There were other people that were like, ‘hey, I really like the increased durability, but do other people like it because I’m really having fun with the back and forth, cat and mouse combat in and out versus like dying instantly.’ That’s not a universal thing.It’s a great point. We had people in the studio that were always having a Tac Sprint. And then when we took it away, they were like, oh yeah, that does feel better that we don’t always have that. There were other people that were like, ‘hey, I really like the increased durability, but do other people like it because I’m really having fun with the back and forth, cat and mouse combat in and out versus like dying instantly.’ That’s not a universal thing.

Jackie: It’s an ecosystem. It’s interesting where touching one thing like TTK and movement actually changes how something like a map design feels. It was great just being all together and talking and staying up late every night, not getting home before 4AM on every night and just pushing.

Győző: I think it really shows that at its core; Call of Duty works because it has a great shooting mechanic. But with relatively small changes, you tweak the TTK a bit, you change a couple of map designs, you move the perks around, and it changes completely at the same time.

Joe: We have the discussions ad nauseum, about perks and categories and guns. It’s nice to see it resonating.

Győző: How did the multiplayer mechanics influence DMZ? For example, when you made the TTK changes, did that also impact DMZ?

Joe: Not directly. Because DMZ has a different health and armor model. DMZ is 150 health and 150 armor max. And because DMZ is variable, you can have 25 armor, you can have 150 armor, depending on any plates you have. We already need to tune DMZ a little bit differently. A lot of our DMZ tuning has been interesting. How do we make the AI manageable yet dangerous yet not require so many for it to be scary? And we do a bunch of interesting things with how the AI damages a player, versus a player fight.

DMZ almost has this asymmetric thing happening. What does it mean for two players to fight? What does it mean for a player to fight AI, or an AI to fight a player? And then what does it mean if you have a player, an AI, and another player all fighting each other? Those are the lenses that we look at DMZ through. Core MP is much purer. It’s 100 health. It’s these engagement ranges and that sort of thing. So the TTK changes we made did not directly impact DMZ.

Gyozo: Did the changes in the multiplayer design impact DMZ?

Joe: In general, the improvements we did to mantling, keeping you in full control, letting you exit mantle, strafe and mantle, mantle to slide, all that comes over into DMZ and feels good. The hip fire stuff, same thing, like the removal of bloom and making that feel good, there was hesitation around that. How do we balance this? I still need ADS so it still feels good. At the end of the day, the changes we did to bloom, make you feel more connected to your weapon, and make you feel like you can aim. I find in DMZ as I enter a room and there’s an AI there, I can full auto and take him out. I feel more like a soldier. When we talk to the SEALs, they hold their weapon at the ready down here, ready to go, and whether they have an infrared laser or not, they can pretty much fire from there. They don’t always have to come up. They can just fire from there. For the close-quarters combat, it feels more realistic. It feels more like the guns in your hand.

Jackie: For equipment field upgrades, stuff like that, we work closely alongside one another. I work more specifically on MP, and there’s other guys that work more specifically on DMZ, but we all talk to each other, we all play each other’s stuff. We’ve been playing off each other’s understanding. Things that don’t make sense in DMZ or vice versa for MP, we don’t bring them wholesale, but we have found very good ways to bring it in so that you’ll have some version of a thing that you can use in MP in the DMZ.

Joe: Like the care package in multiplayer gives you a kill streak. The care package in DMZ gives you ingredients, resources and other things. It’s the same mechanic, but it actually fulfils a different role in the other mode.

Győző: In DMZ, is there any level gating? Can low-level players and high-level players meet? Are there some sort of matchmaking limitations and player protections?

Joe:DMware does all of our matchmaking, and we’ve been talking to them about having the new player pool versus the experienced player pool. But at a certain point, the way we build DMZ is that there’s toys and consumables and armour plates and other things that can improve your effectiveness in DMZ. We’re very careful that it doesn’t have too much of an extreme effect on your moment to moment or your time to kill.

So having a munitions box, having an armour box, having a bomb glider that flies through the air that can explode; that can give you more power in DMZ, but it’s not to the point of some of the other extraction shooters where I have armour that your bullets can’t penetrate. We’re very protective of that. We really want it to be where if you’re in DMZ, the free loadout is always an option. When you go in the free loadout, you have, a plague carrier small backpack. You’re pretty minimal, but you still can go, you have 100 less armor than that other player. You have 200, they have 300 if they’re maxed. You can still take them out, you can still get the jump on them, you can still pay attention, you can still hide. We’re very careful to try and make sure that the power gap is not huge between the items you’re carrying, so that we can have mixed groups.

Győző: What do you think the player aggression level is going to be? Where do you think this game will land in that sense, on a scale from ARC Raiders‘ “nobody fights” to Marathon‘s “shoot on sight”?

Joe: We have the assimilation so you can merge squads. We have the truce flag in the ping wheel. So you can at least send up a thing and they get a message. ‘Hey, this player near you wants the truce, ping it to acknowledge’. And if someone else pings it and you look at each other, you see a flag above their head. So you can say, okay, we’re cool. You have proximity chat. So we’re trying to give people the tools so that they can communicate, so that they can be friendly, but there’s no guarantee.

I think we’ll probably have more combat than ARC Raiders, and it’s Call of Duty, so yeah, it’s gonna be interesting to see. We were surprised in the original beta with a lot of cod players interacting with proximity check for the first time, and we had to fight to keep that in and get that out and let people experiment. I’m hopeful that it’ll be a mix.

We have things like the bounty system in there that are meant to help mitigate that. If you have someone who’s killing a bunch, at a certain point, when they hit bounty level 3, because they’ve killed a lot of players over multiple matches, they’ll tip over the 4th level. Now, if they ever get close to you in a match, you get a splash that says, ‘hey, wanted player in your area’. It shows their operator, their name, and the cash reward on their head.

It’s a way for you to stop talking, avoid them, back up, and not deal with them. We want to have this ecosystem where there’s killers, and there’s bounty hunters who are going after those killers. Then we have people who just want to sit back. The boss board is another thing where people can collect the dog tags off the Lieutenants. But the moment those get picked up, there’ll be a dog tag case just traveling through the world. And that’s letting you know.

If you want to go find PvP, you can go hunt down those players. If you want to avoid those players, you can back up and stay away. We’re hopeful that it’s somewhere in the middle because we actually feel strongly that these PvPvE games are the healthiest when they’re a mix of both.

Győző: When making mission 10 of the campaign, Stranded, was there some intentionality to build something that is closer to DMZ? Like an appetizer. If you want more of this objective-based open-ended gameplay, you can then move on to DMZ.

Joe: There was some of that at the end of the day, the mission was campaign first, so we’re going to make sure that we hit that first. DMZ for us, our connection to the campaign was what’s the inciting incident? ARC Raiders has a great example. The ARC come in, they drive everyone underground. For us, when we looked at this game, it was like, how do we tie this to our world? What’s the reason why North Korea and South Korea are evacuated?

For us, the campaign’s the prequel. You have the nuclear event that happens that causes everyone to evacuate after the invasion. DMZ takes place in the remnants of that. And the enemy force has moved back in, the radiation has subsided, and it’s allowed us to set up this believable world that connects to our story, it brings Ghost in. And so that’s where most of our connection comes from. There’s definitely overlap between the two experiences, but with DMZ, we had to make decisions to make it the best extraction shooter it could be. And then on the campaign side, they had to make decisions to make it the best campaign experience it could be.

And that would be all! Massive thanks to Joe Cecot and Jackie Reynolds for dedicating so much time to us during a crazy busy launch build-up, and likewise to Activision for making this chat happen. And, once more, a huge thanks to our Kat for helping transcribing this 20+ minutes interview!

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 launches on October 23rd for PC, Xbox Series X|S, PlayStation 5 and Nintendo Switch 2! Be sure to check out our impressions for DMZ, which we just chatted about, our other interview about the game’s Campaign, and our complete review for the game as well. See you in the line of duty, soldier!