We traveled to Los Angeles this week for the Call of Duty: Modern Warfare press reveal to learn about the core multiplayer offerings for Infinity Ward's reimagining of the iconic franchise. We've heard plenty on how hardcore, gritty, controversial the single-player story is, but multiplayer is where the franchise has its legs.
Here at Optimist Studios we finally got hands-on with some of Modern Warfare's multiplayer modes and sat down for a group interview with Ben Garnell (Weapons Artist) and Joe Cecot (Multiplayer Design Director). In our chat we discuss what the devs wanted to differently in 2019's Call of Duty game, new modes, progression, making far more realistic weapons and mechanics, and some teases for the future.
Note that some of the questions were edited for clarity, and that not all of the questions are ours.
My first question is: from previous games you’ve worked, but also previous games in the whole Call of Duty series, what’s the biggest thing you’ve wanted to do differently with this year’s iteration?
Ben Garnell: Fantastic question. I can speak for myself; from my point of view first. As a weapons artist – obviously you just saw the gunsmithing system – it’s been a dream of mine ever since I entered into the industry to do specifically that. As someone who appreciates weapons for their visual beauty, their endless customization, and the modifications that you can do, it’s been amazing to work together with Joe and others within the studio. Because everybody got on the same page very quickly early on, and we had the most customization options of any Call of Duty in history. I love being able to say that. So that’s what, for me, was phenomenal about this project.
Joe Cecot: I touched on it a little bit in the presentation, but we were super excited to go back to multiplayer. Last Modern Warfare – I got to work on Modern Warfare 3 – I wasn’t on the multiplayer side. We wanted to go back, but we wanted to innovate and change. We didn’t feel like we’d done that enough. I know Jeff [Zaring], the main level designer on the old games, wanted to come back – he felt like we hadn’t pushed in years; that we’ve kind of gone more and more to the arena shooter. The three lanes and kind of like, “Yep, this map. And then this map!” And they’re all playing a bit the same.
We wanted to add back that depth, and we wanted to change up the experience. We wanted to bring in new ways to play in Call of Duty, and you saw that with some of the night vision gameplay and some of the mechanics that we put in. Pat Kelly said, “We want to be disruptive.” When we started this project, he said our number one goal is that we want to be disruptive and change things up.
We haven’t seen it yet, but it was mentioned that there would be a sort of hardcore mode that removes the HUD elements. Does that also remove the hit markers when you’re tagging targets?
Joe Cecot: Yeah! Yeah, we have this mode. I have an interesting story about this. We alternate; we play on PC and we play on console at work, right? And one of the days we were playing the PC playtest, we were playing in a map called Spear. It’s a beautiful map, but we were playing Gun Game and the HUD was broken. We hadn’t played Gun Game in a while, but something was going on – there was an error, and it was just not drawing. And everyone was just like, “Holy shit!” You’re just seeing the world in the map, and there’s no HUD in the way. It just gave this different feeling and let us see the beauty of what the artists were creating. God, this game looks amazing. Then you had this tension, because you didn’t quite know when you’d killed someone. You’d be like, “Bam! Bam! Bam!” And you’d see them falling, but you didn’t have the crisp hit marker feel.
So we were like, “This is so real. We should put it [in the game].” Then one of the designers, David Mickner, was like, “I made a realism mode. I went through every widget in the HUD, and I set it to not draw when you set this thing.” We tried it, and we played with that. He did another thing where we kept the health the same for the players, but we increased the headshot damage significantly just to make it feel a little bit more real. Then we started playing with it, and we were like, “Okay, we’ve got this night vision gameplay. What if we combine these two?”
We’ve done a bunch of plays with that – and I don’t know if you got to play it, but that’s out there as well – where you’re just in the map, there’s no HUD, it’s night, you’re seeing lasers, and when you kill someone you don’t know if they’re down. It just adds this horror-esque experience. It just changes things up so significantly.
Ben Garnell: There’s a joke that when you’re in realism mode, you don’t ever have to leave the game because the watch on your wrist tells the accurate time. So you don’t even need to check your phone, just play the game.
Is there going to be stuff tied in, apart from the weapons you’re unlocking, in of the content within the campaign mode? Are we going to be seeing pieces of that in the multiplayer modes as well? (Some of the characters that you might encounter or some of the scenes playing out in the campaign. Are we going to be going through those battlefields?)
Joe Cecot: That’s a really good question. I know that some parts of the campaign actually show up – like the Spear map I mentioned is actually a part of the campaign that is in that map. All of the weapons are universal, in that they feel the same with the recoil and everything. We tried so hard.
I talked about this in the last interview, where in the old games, we actually had duplicate weapons. They would diverge, the animations would be different, the firing rates would be different – everything. In this game, we’ve created one experience. That way, if a player uses an MP7 in campaign, when he comes back over to multiplayer it’s going to feel the same. Or if he goes into spec ops.
Ben Garnell: Through the gunsmithing system, you love playing with Captain Price as well during the campaign. Then you go into multiplayer, progress through that weapon, and then gunsmith prices to loadout. Now you are using the weapon you were playing with in single player with all the customization options. We’ll have that shared between all modes.
Do those threads go the other way too? If you unlock everything in multiplayer, is it all going to be available in campaign?
Joe Cecot: Campaign is a curated experience that’s very much true to the Modern Warfares, so Campaign doesn’t have weapon select and things like that. The way that Campaign would feed into Multiplayer spec ops is you’d unlock certain things. So by playing Campaign, you’d reach certain points or do certain things, and that actually feeds content into spec ops.
Multiplayer and Spec Ops is extremely unified. Last game, we started with a shared weapons progression being in co-op and multiplayer. In this game, your loadout’s pretty much wholesale – there’s a few mechanics that aren’t in there because it doesn’t really make sense in a PvP game – but you’re bringing those loadouts back and forth. And the goal there is that if one player is a spec ops player and their buddy’s a multiplayer, you don’t feel like you’re not progressing when you jump back and forth.
So you’re unlocking mods and weapons in spec ops and multiplayer?
Joe Cecot: Yes, completely. So you can take your gunsmith weapon from multiplayer right into spec ops. if I’m going to play a Call game, I’m usually going to bring an LMG, right? I’m going to bring all the ammo I can bring, set that gun up in a different way, and then when I go back into co-op I’ll progress my LMG there. But when I play multiplayer, I like to have my shotguns. It’s a risk-reward thing for me; I have two shots and then I’ve got to reload, and I want that high. But I don’t want that in co-op. I want to kill 100 enemies.
What’s the challenge in trying to find that realism in the weapons, but also keeping it to a game so you’re not killing that flow during the match?
Ben Garnell: I’ll let Joe talk about that but there’s a really funny anecdote that our lead animator showed me yesterday. Because on our 2v2 gameplay that we released, one of the top-rated comments was from a guy who came in and said, “Finally. After playing games for 12 years, I can say the industry knows how to make shotguns. Knows how to make them feel real.”
It’s somebody who was obviously very intimate with the entire action of a shotgun and sounds fairly sick of the gamification. It’s just very interesting seeing how people are picking that out and going, “Huh. This actually feels the way it should now.” I’m interested by that.
Joe Cecot: We worked so hard [on] this game. We fired real guns. We recorded ourselves firing real guns, we recorded Navy SEALs firing gun; we got that juxtaposition of a person who’s maybe not the most athletic and who hasn’t fired a million rounds versus the soldier who’s a well-oiled machine.
Then we dissected that. People were freeze-framing the 50-caliber pistol, and when it fires in real life, it gets a ring. They were freeze-framing it and were like, “Holy shit. They recreated that in the muzzle effect of the gun.” I talked about this on the stage: when you fire a gun, the gun pushes you and your head kind of moves independent of the weapon. So, we have a whole algorithmic system that allows us to do different interpolations. We have snap decay, we have linear decay – we have all these things that allow us to pop instantly and then recover, or ease in and then accelerate. And we apply that to the player’s view; we apply that to the player’s action forward and back; we apply that to the pitch, yaw and roll of the gun.
We have a designer named Cody Pierson, and that is what he focused on for two years. He would go to Arkansas, and he would fire guns. He would go to places in California. We had an armorer come in, and he would just fire guns. He would dig in as far as he could to make them feel real. If you fire the pump shotgun, it goes “Pop! Pop!” and you get this big rock of the weapon, and it feels so powerful.
Ben Garnell: I wish I could play you the video. Nobody was recording it, but when he actually came back and was describing it… You’ve got to imagine this 6-foot something, tall, kind of gangly guy going, “I had it, and then BOOM!” He just took that and ran with it, creating these systems along with many others within the studio. But you could feel it in his voice; he had to recreate that. But obviously their job as designers is to make it damn fun as well.
Joe Cecot: I could tell you about that a little bit, too. So we added more recoil to the guns, and Pat actually kept pushing us. Saying, “More, I want more. I want to feel it; I want the gun to snap.” And given the game’s refresh rate and updates, you have to cheat a little bit and have that gun snap instantly. Your mind connects it. “Oh, that moved.”
But the second part of the question is how we make that fun. We did a lot of work to add more recoil to the guns, and then we added a recoil compensation system. So in the old Call of Duty [games], if the gun recoiled up and you pulled it back down and got it under control, when you released the game would be like, “You kicked this much, so now we need to come back.” It felt really bad; it didn’t feel realistic. So we added this system, and we went through a few different iterations.
What it does is: depending on how much the gun traveled – think about on a 2D plane, how far the gun’s traveling on that screen – if you then interact with that gun in any direction, we directly assume you’re controlling the gun and subtract the travel time you applied to the travel time it did. What it leaves you with is that the gun will generally just stay where you left it. As long as you interact with it. If you don’t interact, if you just hit fire and the gun goes up and you let go, it’ll come back down. But if you actually interact with the weapon, then we detect that and leave you where you are. Maybe you get a little settled because you didn’t clean up all the recoil, but it just allowed us to have all these high recoil guns that you could then master.
Are you letting the players learn how to physically control the weapons based on just their abilities, or are you also baking in some skill appreciation? (e.g. If your skills as a player are better, are you going to get less kickback?)
Joe Cecot: Well, there’s two ways. The way I talked about where you can interact with the stick and learn how to control a weapon, and sometimes you might come straight back or com down to the left or right. Our gun’s recoil is a deterministic path, so if we want, we can keyframe it where the AK goes like this and settles up top or the M4 goes to the right a bit.
So we have that, and then the other part is gunsmithing. We have grips. The vertical grip’s going to help with vertical recoil, and the angle grip’s going to be a little bit less vertical, but it’s also going to help with horizontal. What we find is that players will pair these attachments with a gun, depending on how that gun recoils or depending on how they want to use that gun.
So the upgrade tree is really on the weaponry, not so much on the built-in avatar of the character.
Ben Garnell: Yes. As you’re progressing through that weapon’s tree, two things are happening. You’re unlocking more attachments for it, but at the same time you’re becoming better with that specific firearm and you’re learning it better. So it’s this constant journey of discovery, where you’re now attaching this angle grip.
But the game isn’t making your character more Tier 1 as it goes?
Joe Cecot: No. It’s all about the player.
Ben Garnell: it’s you yourself. What’s funny for me is that, when I first started playtesting earlier on in development, I was sticking on as many attachments as I could. Now when I play, I’m actually finding myself removing certain attachments that I used to use all the time – running with something like an Iron Sight, where I would always use a Red Dot before, because I really want something else.
It was further down the tree but, as I played with that weapon more and I started to understand its behavior better and started to adjust to the Iron Sight and the way that it would kick, suddenly I went, “I don’t need this thing anymore. I now want to play with this.”
I see everybody else still playing with the Red Dot, and I go, “Hmm. I’m a little bit more advanced now.”
Does that correlate with the real world?
Ben Garnell: I would say yes.
Joe Cecot: It’s kind of an interesting way that we’re looking at attachments. We can’t do this 100%, but for every attaching, Cody is running through what [this does] in real life.
Suppressors in the past, they removed the muzzle flash, which changed from the old Call of Duty, and they reduced your audio signature. They didn’t really do anything with recoil and things like that. But in real life, the suppressor actually has an effect on that, and sometimes they’re heavy. So in our game right now, we’re playing a lot more with positives and pros and cons, so the suppressor actually slows down your ADS but helps your recoil and affects your audio signature.
To Ben’s point, you don’t always want to fill your gun up with a bunch of attachments because it might be more advantageous to take one off. Leave a slot open so you don’t affect your ADS, so you don’t affect your player’s mobility and that sort of thing.
Are all the weapons and attachments we’re playing with today the full multiplayer range?
Joe Cecot: No, it’s definitely not all the weapons. We have a lot more weapons, and even attachments. There’s a lot there, but there’s a bunch that we have to turn on.
Are there more coming as part of the free DLC?
Ben Garnell: Mmhmm. Yes.
With Call of Duty World League and everything, it looks like Treyarch and Black Ops have kind of taken over what the Multiplayer is. Do you know anything about whether you’re going to start looking alongside them, or is this going to be its own separate thing? Are we going to see Modern Warfare coming to Blackout?
Joe Cecot: Right now, our whole focus is just on Modern Warfare and launching that, so we don’t really have any information on how we would tie the two. The only thing we have right now is the price in Blackout in the pre-order of the game.
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare releases October 25, 2019 for PC, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One with crossplay between all three platforms.