A conversation with Infinity Ward about Call of Duty

Welcome back to FOV 90, the best and only FPS column at PC Gamer. I've been busy preparing for the summer announcements season, which last week included a trip down to Infinity Ward to see and play Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4. You can read my impressions of 6v6 multiplayer after a handful of matches, but the gist is that Infinity Ward still makes the best-playing games in the series, apex attachments are cool, and the maps I saw were bland.

I also sat down with two senior Infinity Ward devs—multiplayer creative director Joe Cecot and design lead Jacky Reynolds—to talk Modern Warfare 4 and all things Call of Duty. What follows is a transcript of our 30-minute chat, edited for length and clarity.

Topics covered include:

• The friendly competition between Infinity Ward, Treyarch, and Sledgehammer
• Skill-based matchmaking
• How weird Modern Warfare 3 was
• Why Infinity Ward gets more time to make games
• "Ripped from the headlines" campaigns
• Apex attachments
• Aaaand "update requires restart."

PC Gamer: Thanks for making the time guys. To start, I'll say I play every Call of Duty, some more than others. I approach Modern Warfare 4 having a strong preference with Call of Duty. I always like the Infinity Ward games more. That's what I want to ask about: You guys recently said that Infinity Ward games "hit different." What does that mean? How would you quantify that feeling?

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JOE CECOT, MULIPLAYER CREATIVE DIRECTOR: What I want to make sure we say is that this is not in any way to put down the other Call of Duty studios or anything. We have a history of really pushing ourselves on quality, and I think with [Modern Warfare 2019] we pushed really hard to reinvigorate the franchise. To go back to our roots and say "What is a modernized Modern Warfare for today?" And that's what we do with every game. It's something that permeates the whole studio in every department.

This is a little in the weeds of game development, but sometimes you have certain departments that are service departments, and others that are creative departments. At Infinity Ward, every department owns their stuff and is responsible for the quality of their stuff. So our gameplay programmers care, like you would not believe, about how good our gameplay feels. Our animators send out these sizzle reels each month that are like, "Here's the cool fucking shit we've done this week," and everyone gets pumped. We play the game every Friday, and we have these matches where we're screaming and having fun. We're very critical and measured that if we're not having fun playing our game, then we're not doing it right.

Do you think that philosophy has made Infinity Ward sort of the "tastemakers" of Call of Duty?

CECOT: What I would say is: With Black Ops, they have a flavor and they do it really well. And what we talk about in the studio is that it's actually really healthy for the franchise if the different lead studios are able to differentiate, so that you don't get the same game each year. So I think for us, we're always trying to level up ourselves, and I guarantee at Treyarch, they're also trying to level up—they're trying to one-up us, and it's a friendly competition. We're all trying to create the coolest, best first-person shooter each go-around, and I think you can feel it in Modern Warfare 4. We had a little bit of extra time with this one too, with the way the developments lined up, and so we were able to take bigger swings with weapon feel and hipfire accuracy and mobility.

JACKY REYNOLDS, MULTIPLAYER DESIGN LEAD: Yeah, and to elaborate as well, I like to think of Treyarch and Sledgehammer as different flavors of ice cream. There's strawberry, vanilla, and chocolate. They're all good, and they all taste a little different, and I think we're very interested in our taste and maximizing flavor.

It feels like Infinity Ward, in preferring its own flavor, doesn't tend to take aspects of the other series into its games. Like there's no ominimovement in Modern Warfare 4, no wall bounce. Infinity Ward tends to pare things down, right?

CECOT: We like that we have swim lanes. And again, it's what's right for Modern Warfare, right? We take it really seriously when we say we're a Modern Warfare game. Whenever I talk to audio or animation, we talk about how we're a fun game, but when you shoot someone, well I just took somebody's life. I just hurt someone. We want that authenticity and that feel. Everything's meant to be set in this setting, and because we do that, I think it makes the game feel more cohesive.

Those little touches are often my favorite parts of the Modern Warfare games, to the point that sometimes I feel like I'm playing a different game from some of the hardcore corners of the community. When Modern Warfare 2 came out, I remember that first beta where everyone was talking about red pings on minimap and nametags and muzzle smoke. You guys have clearly taken steps to mitigate some of those things that add flair, but aren't competitive. Is that a new philosophy for the team?

REYNOLDS: With every approach we try to learn lessons and move forward, and I think what we had pushed on [with Modern Warfare 2] was to make the game feel more tactical, but I think it came at the cost of the feel and some of the fun. So what we tried to do when building Modern Warfare 4 from the ground up was tackle these points of friction that make the game feel off or feel more sluggish. How do we improve on them? Rebuild them from the ground up so that you get that fluidity and that feel back, while also making sure that we maintain the kind of grit, groundness, and tactical play that we're known for. We really want to fire on all cylinders.

Of course we care about community and feedback, but we also want to take it further than just giving them what they want. When they complain about something, we ask what they are really talking about underneath, and how do we approach that problem and build it in a way that surpasses their expectations as well as our own.

CECOT: I think what I've been saying is with Modern Warfare 2, we made some changes that were maybe healthier for the game, the way it played, but created friction and removed fun for some players. So whenever we make changes in this game, the changes need to do both. They need to make the game healthier, but also make sure the game still feels fun, still feels responsive.

Can we take a moment to also reflect on Modern Warfare 3? Because that was a strange moment for the series. It was a subsequent sequel. It wasn't primarily an Infinity Ward game. The campaign was weird, and it also directly reversed several Infinity Ward decisions just a year earlier. How did the studio react to that when going into Modern Warfare 4?

CECOT: I think some of the changes that Modern Warfare 3 made actually felt good. And so we took a step back, we looked at our game, where we'd gone from MW2019 to MW2. We really want to make mantle feel good, not just faster. That's when we rewrote the mantle system and we made sure that one: it now maintains your momentum, two: you can now strafe in it, and three: you can mantle right into a slide.

Instead of just tweaking some numbers, we pushed hard into making it feel like an extension of movement, like you never lost control. For us it was a learning thing and it was also about taking the time. The nice thing is we identified it early, right at the beginning of the project, and said we want to do this.

You mentioned that you guys had extra time with this game. That's something that fans always wonder about: Does Infinity Ward just get to take more time with Call of Duty?

CECOT: It just worked out that way, given the strategy of launching multiple [Modern Warfares and Black Ops] in a row. So we looked at it as an opportunity. We said, "Okay, what are the big swings we're going to take to really improve the game?" And that's where the mobility stuff came from, that's where Kill Block came from, and the hip fire and all the fidelity changes.

One of the big swings from last year's game was limited skill-based matchmaking. Is that something that Infinity Ward is also interested in, based on how well it was received?

CECOT: We're always interested in matchmaking. We don't have any specifics today to talk about. What I can tell you is we are working with Demonware. They are heavily looking at and working on Black Ops 7 and reviewing how matchmaking is working there. There will be future communications coming out about matchmaking before launch.

[Activision PR chimed in here to let me know that Demonware, one of the many studios that collaborate on Call of Duty each year, handles all things networking for the series. That includes the inner workings of matchmaking.]

I also wanted to ask about maps. I like how it looks to climb pipes in Modern Warfare 4—it's very fluid, it's easy. Though in the few maps I saw today, it seems like where there was a pipe, there could have just been a ladder. I really like that shooting course you guys showed off because it had a bunch of verticality and dynamic angles. It was also a parkour map. Are there maps that feel more like that in Modern Warfare 4?

CECOT: There's no map that plays like the mobility course, because the mobility course is meant to just stress test movement. Our core multiplayer maps do have a variety of looks and feels. We have a map called Coal that I don't think you played that does have more verticality.

The pipe climb is a really interesting traversal mechanic that we use in our maps and feels like it makes sense in our world, and it's fun and fluid to use. But with core multiplayer maps, the most important thing for us is mostly the gunplay. It's not meant to be all parkour.

Modern Warfare has always had this "ripped from the headlines" attitude with its campaigns. I'm curious: As people, does this stuff get harder when the real world and actual headlines are almost as horrifying as the ones you guys write in campaigns? Has that affected how Infinity Ward makes a Modern Warfare story?

CECOT: We're an entertainment product, you know, and so even though the world is rough, there's still really great movies that deal with that content, and they provide an experience, and so we look at it through that lens. We're no different, right? I play games like World of Tanks, Arc Raiders, I bounce around all these different games where I get to roleplay as a different person, a different thing, a different place. So for us that's the modern military tier one operation, or the grunts.

When people see this campaign from the outside looking in, one thing they're going to say is that this is Call of Duty choosing a combination of countries that are not currently in the headlines, experiencing something horrific, because it's safer that way. As opposed to depicting the fake Middle East, for instance. Is that a conscious choice?

CECOT: Jacky and I aren't the best people to talk through campaign, but I would say: Korea was really interesting to us. When we look at these games, we do want to be "ripped from the headlines," we want to be hitting on pop culture and what's popular, and we want to be globetrotting, so we appeal to a wide audience. Whether it's Americans, Europeans, Koreans—all of that stuff goes into it.

I noticed we didn't talk at all about Warzone today.

CECOT: Yes. We want to talk about Warzone, but we're not ready to. Outside of that, it's very important to us. We worked on the original Warzone and directed that, so we're excited to share more about that. We just can't right now.

Part of me was hoping that Modern Warfare 4 would be a clean split from the Modern Warfare/Warzone marriage, because people have a lot of thoughts about what happens when those guns have to cross into other games, and if that actually works out.

CECOT: We have those thoughts too. We can't share any specifics.

So, apex attachments. If you've ever read one of my Call of Duty reviews, I always talk about how Gunsmith is cool, but everyone wants to make the same laser beam.

CECOT: Yeah.

REYNOLDS: Totally.

The only thing I really loved about Modern Warfare 3 were the aftermarket attachments, because they meaningfully changed a gun's behavior—defined its role. Does that also represent how Infinity Ward sees guns in Modern Warfare 4? Not just tuning sliders up and down?

REYNOLDS: I think it came from going all the way back to Modern Warfare 2 (2009) and CoDs from that era. You would look at a gun in the killcam, and it had a heartbeat sense and a silencer and was blinged out. You would go, "Damn, I want that."

I think that gaming tastes have changed, and the way building a weapon has changed over the course of the franchise, and apex attachments is really a culmination of that. We give you a new way to play with a weapon that you already know and love. And the idea is not to not make it more OP, necessarily, but to have a new toy to play with.

CECOT: It allows you to find new reasons to love the weapon you already have, and define your playstyle and your class even further than we have before. We wanted something at the end of the gun leveling process that says "this was worth it."

One of the best things as designers is if you make something where players think they're circumventing your system, or they're cheating or whatever. It's that kind of reward loop that we wanted, so that hopefully players want to get all guns to max level and have all the apex attachments.

I also like that having an apex attachment makes guns feel closer to a classic shooter, where you'd have a primary and secondary fire.

CECOT: Oh yeah, like Unreal. With the flak cannon and stuff like that. We've definitely leaned into that, right? Our underbarrel system has gone nuts.

I'm glad you guys said you're working on "update requires restart," because I was going to come in here and ask why Call of Duty is the only game that still makes me do this.

CECOT: Yeah, it's true. We hate it too. It is something that is being worked on. We want to kill it. This project, I think the only question is can we do it on the Switch 2 or not? But it is something we're absolutely trying to get rid of. We hate it too.

Thanks for your time, folks.