Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 Interview

Activision’s probably right. Modern Warfare 2 will no doubt be the “biggest entertainment launch of all time”. Interest is huge, and yet we know little beyond what developer Infinity Ward showed us behind closed doors at E3 (check out our first-look preview here). So, with enough questions to fill a stationary-cupboard’s worth of notepads, we hunted down Robert Bowling, director of communications/community manager, to try and get a little more detail on the game destined to tear up the shooter records this November. Here’s what he had to say.

VideoGamer.com: How do you feel about the reaction to the game’s showing at E3?

Robert Bowling: It was fantastic. We had a huge showing there. It was the first time anybody had seen first-person gameplay footage of the game. So that was fantastic, not just from people here but listening to all our fans that are out there that are Tweeting and emailing us and seeing them on the forums. Their reaction to everything we’re showing here has been the best part of E3.

VideoGamer.com: You’re famous for being the link between the community and the game. Why is it important for Infinity Ward that you do what you do?

RB: Community is a major focus for us. That’s who we’re making our games for. We make the games for ourselves because we consider ourselves part of the community, and we’re making the games for them. Those are the guys who are playing it every night with me on Xbox LIVE and PSN. These are the guys who are teaming up and making it worthwhile. These are the 12 million people who keep it at the top of the most-played games. So there’s no reason why they shouldn’t be an integral part of the development process. We bring them in early. As soon as we announced we were working on Modern Warfare 2, we put it out there and we said: what’s the one thing you want to see in it? Just let us know. We’ve been incorporating that feedback throughout the entire development in single-player and now as things are focusing more and more on multiplayer it’s going to be going that way.

VideoGamer.com: Have you got any examples of feedback you’ve had from the community that you’ve incorporated into the game?

RB: Cliffhanger is a perfect example. The level we’ve shown at E3 is a great example of the community feedback. If you look early on at that first question we asked on Twitter, we said what’s one thing you want? Snow maps, bigger levels and new weapons were the top three things you’d see. Cliffhanger incorporates it all. We have a lot of the new weapons. We’ve brought over the attachment system from multiplayer and put it into single-player, so you’re constantly thinking of new variations of weapons, like with red dots and suppressors. And then obviously it’s a massive snow level that incorporates stealth and straight up action, low visibility snow, that’s what people were asking for. We have the streaming textures that we introduced because we knew larger levels, bigger missions and big worlds was a big request from our community. Streaming textures allows us to do that because we can build out these massive environments but still keep them high res and super detailed.

VideoGamer.com: Are you going for a similar length of campaign with MW2 as you had with MW, or shorter or longer?

RB: We never go into a design saying, okay we have to be X amount of hours. We really focus on the story of the game and let the story determine the pacing of the game. A good story is all about pacing – your peaks, your valleys, you want to take them to a specific experience. It’s not cranked to 11 all of the time. We have a lot of variety in the game and we want the player to constantly be doing something new without it getting stale. So you never want to have a great mechanic and ruin it by making them do it over and over again. For example, the snowmobile mission is super intense, it’s fast-paced and it’s fun to do. It might be fun to do that first time and if it’s crafted really well then it might be fun another time, but if you keep making it over and over, you could have too much of a good thing. It’s all about the overall experience. You want to walk away and be like, wow, that was amazing.

VideoGamer.com: Why did you decide to call it Modern Warfare 2 and not Call of Duty: something else?

RB: It’s because Modern Warfare 2 is a direct sequel to Modern Warfare 1. It still lives in the Call of Duty universe but that’s never been done before in the Call of Duty series. Typically the games are independent and have nothing to do with the previous or later ones. This one is a direct sequel to Modern Warfare 1. We picked this story up where that one left up. That’s very important to get out to our community. This isn’t just another one in the franchise. This is the sequel to one of the best-selling shooters of all time.

VideoGamer.com: Why do a direct sequel? Was it simply because Modern Warfare proved so popular and changed the Call of Duty franchise forever?

RB: No. The decision was made before it became this huge juggernaut that everybody wants. The decision really comes because we loved the story and the direction we were going in Modern Warfare so much. It was the first time we got to do a clean creative slate. Before all our games were rooted in history, World War II. This was the first time we got to create our own conflict, our own characters and our own villain. And so we wanted to continue that story. We like to think of Modern Warfare 1 being like leading to the climax that is Modern Warfare 2.

VideoGamer.com: So how many more Modern Warfare games can there be? Do you see it as a two-year franchise?

RB: We don’t. Right now we’re just focused on Modern Warfare 2 and we want to make that game and we want to do a lot of community support after it launches. Right now we’re not even thinking about what we’re doing in the future. We want to do this and we want to support our community after it comes out and do some map packs. That’s where our focus is right now.

VideoGamer.com: What are some of the highlight new weapons?

RB: There are a lot of new weapons in the game.

VideoGamer.com: What are some of your favourites?

RB: A lot of new attachments. It’s hard to say. We have the TAR-21, which is my personal favourite weapon, and we have a lot of cool new attachments to that. With the thermal sight on it it’s really awesome. There’s the Famas in it, which a lot of people were asking for because it’s a weapon you’ll see in a lot of games. A lot of new pistols – you saw the Glock on the snowmobile when he was doing it one handed, and a lot of automatic pistols. So there’s a lot of cool stuff that we’ve added.

VideoGamer.com: Multiplayer was a massive part of the original’s popularity. What have you taken on board from the community regarding multiplayer?

RB: A lot of stuff that I can’t talk about! We’re not going into detail on multiplayer yet, but once we do it’s going to be like a floodgate opened up.

VideoGamer.com: In World at War we saw a co-op campaign and a Left 4 Dead-style alternative co-op mode. Is that something you guys are looking at doing?

RB: We have co-op in our Special Ops mode, which is a mode separate from the story campaign. That mode is designed to be replayed over and over again. We don’t do co-op in our story because we’re crafting a very specific experience and we don’t want to ruin that by cramming co-op into it. We take the moments that work really well with co-op, we bring them out and we put them in Special Ops. We let them not worry about breaking the plot or breaking the story. Story’s all about pacing, and sometimes moments get toned down because they don’t fit with the pacing of the experience you’re trying to deliver. There it’s all about fun. It’s about playing over and over again, getting a better time – you’ll have a time at the end of it – it’s about challenging a friend going in on co-op and trying to beat it on veteran. Some of them will be taken directly from single-player, some will be crafted specifically for that mode.

VideoGamer.com How many players will that be?

RB: Two player.

VideoGamer.com: That’s interesting. Why two-player and not four-player?

RB: Two player seemed to be the magic number for co-op. That’s when it stayed really fun and intense without becoming a clusterf**k of things. We just found that two-players was the way that was the most fun.

Modern Warfare 2 is scheduled for release on Xbox 360, PS3 and PC on November 10, 2009.