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Sep 9, 2022 · One Day, Five Ways: Inside the Creative Culture of Infinity Ward. It takes a village to launch a game. Five Infinity Ward employees describe life at the studio, how they got to where they are, and what it’s like working on the new Call of Duty®: Modern Warfare™ II. 2022 is a huge year for Call of Duty.
Jun 2, 2022 · Preparing for a New Era of Call of Duty. , Presented by Infinity Ward. Twenty years after its foundation, Infinity Ward is at the forefront of revolutionizing Call of Duty. While looking back at the studio’s many accomplishments so far, we welcome them to introduce the new era of the franchise this fall with Call of Duty ®: Modern Warfare ® II.
- From Medal of Honor to Modern Warfare.
- All D-Day, All the Time
- Second Assault
- Online Superiority
- Call of Duty: The Complete Playlist
By Matt Purslow
Updated: Oct 23, 2023 6:59 pm
Posted: Oct 23, 2023 2:00 pm
Very few video games have truly changed the way we play. The likes of Half-Life, World of Warcraft, and Fortnite are once-in-a-generation shifts. October 2023 marks the 20th anniversary of one of those seismic games: the original Call of Duty. What began as an attempt to beat Medal of Honor at its own game turned into a monolithic franchise with over 400 million sales across 30 different games. It was a significant turning point for both FPS campaign design and online multiplayer, ushering in an era of cinematic set pieces and ladder-based progression. Call of Duty was, undoubtedly, the FPS that changed shooters forever.
The tale of Call of Duty can, technically speaking, be traced back to the Second World War, the conflict out of which the series formed its bedrock. But it was not the war itself that birthed Call of Duty so much as the movies that emerged from it. And so the true starting point for its story is not a mission but a man: a director called Steven Spielberg.
During his days making the war epic Saving Private Ryan, Spielberg would often watch his son play GoldenEye 007. This sparked an idea for a video game that could be both educational and entertaining. The result was Medal of Honor, released in 1999 for the original PlayStation. But both it and its sequel, Medal of Honor: Underground, focused on small-scale infiltration missions. For the third game in the series, publisher Electronic Arts had ambitions of something much grander: D-Day.
Infinity Ward was an opportunity for a clean start. When the team sat down to plan out their first game, their initial ideas were a far cry from the Western Front. Pitches for a sci-fi shooter and even a first-person mediaeval fantasy spellcaster were on the table. But Infinity Ward’s new publisher, Activision, encouraged the team to start with what they were comfortable with. And so it was back to World War 2 once more for another PC exclusive. Internally, they called this game the “Medal of Honor Killer”.
“Jason [West, Infinity Ward’s engineering lead] used to say, his through line for making Call of Duty was, ‘Let's do all D-Day all the time,’” says McCandlish, who joined Infinity Ward as a programmer. “So that was a high bar to set. Burnville was one of the first levels we did, and we were trying to put guns going off in the sky, paratroopers coming down, explosions, hills dynamically turning into craters where an explosion happened, MG42s opening up. All as just a run-of-the-mill level.”
It was in this idea that Call of Duty’s signature intensity was born. But the most important lesson Call of Duty would take from Allied Assault wasn’t the ferocity of D-Day’s guns and artillery. It was the AI squad members who lent the mission that feeling of hard-fought sacrifice.
“It's ‘No one fights alone,’” McCandlish explains. “You feel like you're a squad, which goes back to those early explorations in Medal of Honor really coming to fruition where there's always friendly characters around you, talking with you. They're able to die. More of them are always coming on from some other offscreen point, creating that feeling all around you of you're in a war and it's real.”
By doubling down on what began in Allied Assault, Infinity Ward used a vastly increased number of squad members to lend Call of Duty its unique wartime flavour. Where classics like Doom, Half-Life, and the original Medal of Honor always cast the player as a lone gunman, Call of Duty could significantly adjust its tone through the use of supporting characters.
“I think that feeling of activity in a living world really differentiated what we were making,” observes McCandlish. “But I don't think it was because we looked at other games and said they could be more living. It's more like we watched a lot of Band of Brothers.”
Activision quickly began spinning Call of Duty into a wider franchise. While Infinity Ward got to work on a full sequel, another developer - Grey Matter - was brought in to create an expansion pack that took Call of Duty’s campaign to brand new places, including a mission set inside a B-17 Flying Fortress.
But Activision knew Call of Duty couldn’t stay on PC. Spark Unlimited, another studio formed by Medal of Honor veterans, was contracted to create Call of Duty: Finest Hour, a console game that acted as something of a companion to the PC original. Released a year after the first game, it received more muted reviews than its sibling, but worked as a stop-gap while console players waited for the real thing: Infinity Ward’s second album.
Call of Duty 2 arrived in 2005 as a launch title for the Xbox 360. As far as sequels go, it was relatively traditional; the same intense action approach, but with better graphics, thicker atmosphere, and higher-fidelity explosions. It saw the team revisit the Normandy beach landings for the first time since Allied Assault, and on its sands we can see the evolution of Infinity Ward’s cinematic ambitions laid clear. But behind the sequel’s iterative improvements was a studio trying to work out what its next significant step would be.
“We wanted to make a game that was more non-linear,” McCandlish recalls. “We felt like we solved this linear thing. And that experimenting went on a little too long and led to more going back and trying to salvage what we could and retreat back to linear.”
At the time, nonlinear was the most important buzzword in video games. But it wasn’t the right step for Call of Duty; this was a series that thrived on cinematic direction. Infinity Ward knew it was time to move forward in one way or another, though, and if that change wasn’t structure, then it was setting. The team wanted its third game to pull the series out of the 1940s and bring it into the modern day.
“We had wanted to explore modern from the early days,” says McCandlish. “And there was also a very functional side to [wanting a modern setting]. It's like, how many closets can I spawn bad guys from? Can I bring a helicopter in to bring some reinforcements? So can I put an attachment on a gun? There were things we wanted from the modern era that we couldn't do [in the 1940s].”
Online play has been part of Call of Duty since its inception. Cinematic campaigns may have been the focus of the first couple of games, but Infinity Ward had nonetheless tried to find a unique approach for its multiplayer since the very beginning.
“I have a lot of really positive memories of playing Call of Duty 1 multiplayer on PC,” says McCandlish. “Back then you could put 64 players plus on a server and you'd play Search and Destroy, our version of Counter-Strike. And then once you're dead, you're out.
“We didn't have kill streaks, so we didn't have unlocks and stuff,” he recalls. “It was interesting that we had that choice of when you're playing British, you're only getting British guns, which was differentiating from ‘Here's Half-Life, everybody gets every gun, here's Quake, everybody gets every gun.’ So I think it had its own flavour.”
Modern Warfare was an opportunity to try a new flavour, though. And Infinity Ward went bold. Despite Halo’s evolution of the Quake-style multiplayer arena reigning supreme in the early 2000s, the team planned something radically different. They reconsidered how almost every component of Call of Duty’s online suite worked. The most significant innovation was progression; instead of the old design of choosing from a selection of pre-determined weapons before you spawn, Modern Warfare asked players to improve their personal loadouts over time by climbing an XP ladder of increasingly exciting guns.
“It may seem obvious now that ‘Oh yeah, you unlock guns,’ but internally that was very divisive,” McCandlish says. “It's like, ‘No, you can't do that. You’ve got to earn your guns in shooters.’ Or ‘You’ve got to have fairness of guns.’ You can't have an unfair advantage at the beginning, but we went with it and it worked.”
“And then on top of that, of course, unlocks and perks, which is a Fallout thing,” McCandlish reveals. “And in Fallout, the perk usually has a good side and a bad side of the coin. So we [said] ‘Eh, we don't need the bad side as much,’ but we will keep this idea of creating your own character from the collection of positive characteristics you want for your character. And that also helped define the game and set it apart from the games at the time.”
From the original PC hit to the ever-expanding lineup of console, handheld, and mobile Call of Duty games, this is the complete series in trackable and sortable form.
Matt Purslow is IGN's UK News and Features Editor.
Infinity Ward, Inc. is an American video game developer. They developed the video game Call of Duty , along with seven other installments in the Call of Duty series . Vince Zampella , Grant Collier, and Jason West established Infinity Ward in 2002 after working at 2015, Inc. previously.
Infinity Ward is a video game developer located in Woodland Hills, Los Angeles, California. Infinity Ward is the studio behind the creation of the Call of Duty series and is now one of the primary studios working on the franchise. Infinity Ward was founded in 2002 by former employees of 2015, Inc., which developed Medal of Honor: Allied Assault and was acquired by Activision in 2003. Infinity ...
Sep 25, 2019 · Part 1: Telling the Story of Modern Warfare. Infinity Ward Narrative Director Taylor Kurosaki (right), Single Player Design Director Jacob Minkoff (center), and Writer Brian Bloom (left) dig deep into what went into crafting the Campaign of Call of Duty ®: Modern Warfare ®. September 25, 2019. by James Mattone.
Nov 12, 2019 · Here’s how it works. (Image credit: Infinity Ward) Call of Duty: Ghosts is rooted in a military fairy tale – a spec ops Battle of Thermopylae in which 14 men stay behind to defend a civilian ...
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