This postmortem by the lead designer and technical art director of Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare first appeared in the March 2008 issue of Game Developer magazine.

Call of Duty 4 was Infinity Ward's third Call of Duty game, and as such we approached it knowing we needed to do something fresh.

We don’t want to pigeonhole ourselves any more than we have to, and many members of the team came off Call of Duty 2 promising never to work on another WWII game.

We tried several different directions, many of which were failures, but the ultimate result was the best game any of us have ever worked on. As a game development experience, it seemed to go so smoothly that it was difficult to come up with five things that went wrong.

WHAT WENT RIGHT

1) MODERN SETTING.

Coming off Call of Duty 2, we knew we wanted to do something different for our next game. We don’t agree with some critics who say that WWII as a genre is dead, but we couldn’t muster the same passion for the subject that we had in our first three WWII games (Call of Duty 1 and 2 and Medal of Honor: Allied Assault). We had a few ideas that we wanted to do and eventually settled on two. One was Modern Warfare, and the other was a new project. 

Modern-day warfare is very emotional for people, which is both good and bad. We really wanted to avoid referencing any current, real wars, and one aspect of the gameplay that we really didn’t want to change from previous titles was the idea of two large opposing forces with similar numbers and technology. To facilitate that, we invented a war with several fronts, primarily involving a group splintered from the Russian army, with a secondary front in the Middle East. 

The modern setting inspires an enormous amount of gameplay variety. Modern warfare is very different from more traditional warfare in that direct confrontations between huge armies are relatively rare. Instead, you have a huge variety of different types of low-intensity conflicts and special forces missions. Because we already had a very sophisticated scripting language in our engine, we were able to implement and iterate on that variety quickly, and take advantage of the modern setting to shake up the gameplay, but still deliver a polished result. Modern weapons and tech are something that people like to see and play with. Kids the world over grow up fantasizing about being a soldier, and we aimed to let adults live out their childhood fantasies (Call of Duty 4 is rated M). But we also knew we wanted to keep that signature Call of Duty grittiness and avoid making the game feel too techy. One thing that helped us there was focusing the U.S. part of the game on Marines, who get a lot of their equipment second-hand from the Army. 

By moving away from history and into the current day, we were able to do much more useful reference gathering. For example, the effect that happens when you are near an Abrams tank when it fires was inspired by our designers, artists, and sound designers experiences at a live-fire exercise at 29 Palms, which is a Marine training facility in the California desert. We were able to talk to real marines only weeks out of combat to get a feel for the background, emotions and attitude of soldiers in combat, and we had vets supervising our mocap and AI design to make sure our tactics were sound.

2) CLEAR GOALS.

At the beginning of Call of Duty 4, looking at what we had done with Call of Duty 2, we saw two main areas we needed to focus on improving. First, by dedicating more development time to multiplayer, we felt we could make some really big improvements. Second, we knew we needed to tell a story. 

Call of Duty 4 is our first game where we had a team working on multiplayer for the entire project. The quality bar for single-player first person shooters is really high right now, but there were and still are a lot of things that no one has really tried to do with multiplayer, and based on the success of the multiplayer in our previous games, we thought we could really impress. 

With a seasoned lead and some dedicated designers and programmers, Modern Warfare multiplayer was much more ambitious, much more polished, and generally much better than ever before. 

Story is something we’ve always put a little effort into, but by and large we’ve prioritized it below other aspects of our games. Moving away from WWII and into a fictional war removed that option. We spent hours brainstorming with military advisors, trying to come up with a credible scenario that would involve a large-scale war, and then weeks interviewing writers trying to find someone who could help us craft a narrative that would draw the player in. The result, while not Shakespearean, has drawn almost universal praise. We feel like we have a new skill, and we intend to build on it in our future projects.

3) ALMOST NO TURN OVER.

Low turnover is Infinity Ward’s secret weapon. You can throw all the money, top talent, outsourcing, mocap, and high-end middleware you want at a project, but without a team that knows how to work together, you’ll only end up with delays and a fragmented product. We still have 20 of the 27 or so developers who worked on Allied Assault six years ago, so our team has a remarkably stable base. 

Before we started on Call of Duty 4, we spent two years developing and using our new engine on PC and Xbox 360, and two years before those using parts of it (notably the scripting system and the level editor) on Call of Duty 1 on PC. By retaining almost all of our people, we retained almost all of that experience. We were able to leap right into development on Modern Warfare, improving the engine, creating art assets and building levels immediately. Our leads were able to work directly on game content rather than spend all their time wrangling a team of new people.

4) EXPERIENCE WITH THE HARDWARE.

We were very lucky (or smart, depending on who you ask) to have a team that had built a game on this generation of hardware before. Our engine already worked on the 360 and PC, and we already had 360 dev kits and tools that worked on them. We knew what performance to expect and had a good idea of how to optimize our assets for the hardware. The PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 have similar graphical capabilities, which meant that almost all the experience our artists had on the 360 on the last project was directly applicable to both consoles this project. While PCs are always changing, they didn’t change so much in the two years since Call of Duty 2 that we had to relearn anything—we just made improvements to our technique.

Relating to the previous point, we didn’t need to hire many new people. We had staffed up dramatically for our first “next gen” game, but starting Call of Duty 4 we already had the team in place, and they already knew how to use our engine and tools. 

By building on what we already had, we were able to reach higher in two years than if we’d been forced to start from scratch. This goes not only for engine features, but also for tools and content too. By the end of the project we had replaced almost all the content carried over from Call of Duty 2, but having it available during development removed bottlenecks and allowed us to work faster.

5) SIMULTANEOUS MULTI-PLATFORM DEVELOPMENT.

From the point of view of our artists and designers, the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 have very similar abilities, so we could share assets between them. PC is a broad target, and at this stage in the console lifecycle, the consoles still have similar performance to mid-high end PCs, so we could share assets there, too. Of the thousands of assets in the game, only a few dozen are platform specific. 

Working with an engine that already runs on all the target platforms—and keeping it running on all those platforms during development—is far easier than trying to port it near the end. While the end result on the two consoles is almost identical, the innards are dramatically different in many cases. On the PC, the differences are obvious. Depending on the specs of the PC or the user’s choice, the game can run at one of dozens of different resolutions, with different texture and model detail settings, different control schemes, and different graphics hardware and drivers. Adding the functionality to allow the user to choose between those settings at the end of the project, while simultaneously trying to finalize the game on other platforms, would have been impossible.