Infinity Ward 对《使命召唤：现代战争4》多人模式的改进 | 独家专访

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 finally launches in full today after more than a week of staggered releases, first with the campaign a week ago and the DMZ multiplayer extraction mode on Tuesday. Now, all players can get access to the full game, including multiplayer.

I’ve written a review here, as well as individual reviews of DMZ and the single-player campaign. I also interviewed the leaders behind DMZ and the campaign. Now I’ve got an interview with a couple of the leaders behind the multiplayer mode, which is expansive.

I visited Infinity Ward’s headquarters in Los Angeles, played the game and then interviewed two multiplayer leaders: Jack Hoppus, multiplayer designer; and Geoffrey Smith, studio multiplayer creative director.

Modern Warfare 4 multiplayer delivers grounded, precise combat where fluid movement,
player choice, and greater control define engagements. Your skill at shooting matters a lot, but you get a lot of help from precise guns and the smoothness and speed of movement.

You’re no longer held back (at least for lesser skilled players like me) by omnimovement, which gave expert players an advantage in the last couple of years. You could round a corner and your enemy could be doing a bunny hop, or be jumping high, or sliding low or diving sideways with a gun pointed straight at you. It was very hard to master.

Instead, you get the basics of that kind of movement without having to press a lot of buttons at the same time. In shooting, bullets go where you aim them, rather than scattering randomly. Targets are more visible, even when you’re aiming down the sight. Now you can mantle an object and aim at the same time.

The force of concussions can also knock you down if a mortar round or aircraft bomb or just a grenade goes off near you. It makes the experience scary.

The assault rifles are deadly once you level them up, and the sniper rifles can take out a lot of soldiers with one shot — but not if they’re packing a lot of armor. (This makes sniping harder in DMZ and any other maps where you can armor up). Those with aiming skill will benefit from this, and that’s fair.

There’s a part of the game that benefits from AI, where the artificial intelligence can recommend the best loadout for you based on the level you’re at and the weapons and attachments that you carry. This Gunny system brings a Gunnery Sergeant’s eye weapon customization, helping players quickly assemble effective builds based on their preferred playstyle and unlocked attachments.

Modern Warfare 4 introduces greater player choice through two Prestige paths: Classic Prestige and Regular Prestige. Classic Prestige delivers the traditional reset experience, relocking Create-a-Class progression in exchange for  increased XP earn rates and access to exclusive Prestige rewards.

On day one, there are 12 new core six-versus-six human player maps set in distinct locations around the world. I had a chance to play a lot of them, and to try many different modes. I love the usual Team Deathmatch, Domination, Hardpoint and Ground War maps (though the latter seems like a bit too many players in too small a space). Search and Destroy is slower and it’s really appealing to the skillful.

Here’s our edited transcript of the interview.

GamesBeat: What’s the overall message you have for players about like say what’s what’s new and different this time versus last year, or versus the last Modern Warfare as well?

Jack Hoppus: For multiplayer, it’s a big thing for us. I think we’ve talked about a couple times. Is just the fluidity of player movement, and that also translates to what we did with the MP or the map design. Some of the maps we reduced the amount of interiors or reduced the amount of like second story buildings, so the maps would inherently play a little quicker because you don’t have to slow down and clear these interiors. It’s not all the maps.

We added that into the mix of some of the other ones that could come in with that. I haven’t seen people playing with Gunny (an AI-aided recommendation for your loadout) out there, but I think Gunny is a humongous feature. We found that people were just sometimes feeling overwhelmed with the depth of Gunsmith, and so just having that weapon-build recommender really helps spit out new weapons.

We’re a big fan of Gunny. Yeah, gunny’s good. I I like it a lot because even at the studio for our more like advanced players that will like spend a bunch of time in gunsmith, they find it really useful to get a good starting ground on the potential of a weapon and immediately feel the power of it.

I think the overall in MP, one of our guiding lights was this fluidity of motion, fluidity of movement, to never make you feel like you’re stuck in an animation that you can’t get out of, or in a state that you can’t break out of, or feel like the game is telling you that you can’t do something. You have the ability to do the action, play the way you want to play, and just have the result be balanced in the end. That is what we wanted to shoot for this time around.

GamesBeat: What am I missing about the disappearance of Gunsmith?

Hoppus: It’s still there. Gunny is just a little helper. So it takes what you have and then arranges a weapon and says, this weapon is good at short range or medium range. Yeah. So it’s all still there. It’s just a way of searching that and and coming up with a quicker way to get to a weapon.

GamesBeat: You can change your weapon class in the middle of a match, or whenever.

Smith: You can go in after the fact if you want to change out the optic for something else. Or you may want to change out the ammo type or something. You can go ahead and do that right away.

Hoppus: You can fully edit your weapon during your game.

Smith: You can do Killstreaks (in the middle of a match) as well. So if you want to play the objective and have a bunch of set and forget Killstreaks, like these autonomous choppers or these missiles that you can call in from from afar, you could do that. Or if you want things that you’re actually in control of, and you want to drive, like the bomb glider, you can fly it around the map. The crossfire, these dual airstrikes that you can come and do these double strafing paths, where you can ride in like the Death Stalker, which is our new chopper gunner experience that you can fire two guns at the same time. So you can tailor that for.

GamesBeat: For the average skill multiplayer gamer — I count myself in that group — is there something they’re going to notice that’s different for them. I think the omni movement isn’t there right with MW4. That takes out a lot of complexity, I think, for average-skill players. But there’s still sliding and jumping and things like that. Going around the corners, I still get surprised by people. But it’s not as elaborate a surprise as like last year [with Black Ops 7]. So, what was some of the intention there to be just being different? I mean, why don’t you adopt all of omnimovement.

Hoppus: We make a “grounded” military game, and we try to stick to that and try to present that as our theme. Some of the jumping around felt a bit more like Hong Kong cinema back in the day.”

GamesBeat: You’re balancing fun with reality.

Hoppus: Yeah. We used some of the omnimovement for our knockdown — our shockwave mechanic, where an explosion will knock you down. We used it where it made sense for us, but from sliding across cars and things like that, we still have more of a Hollywood action military slide instead of just this documentary slide. But it’s just a balance of how do those mechanics apply to our game? When we talk about like different things, I think the removing Tac-Sprint (very fast running) and putting it into a Perk allows people to use Tac-Sprint in that play style.

GamesBeat: It’s for people running around with a knife.

Hoppus: Yeah, we look at different things. We call them toys: the lethals, tacticals, and field upgrades to see if we can affect play style. Like the barbed wire trap. I don’t know if you ran into that. That stops the Zerg rush that you might get from people constantly closing in on you. We can come up with mechanics that might put a little slow spell into the world to stop those who want to augment how they would like to play. So, to counter that, we have like the Seeker Drone that you can put out and you can chase it and you can move really fast and it will help find people for you. And so we try to add these different elements in for potential play style.

GamesBeat: Was the Seeker just finding you or was it actually killing you too?

Hoppus: the Seeker will do a snapshot thermal imaging of people.

GamesBeat: Is there another killer drone like the Bomb Drone?

Hoppus: Normally we reserve the the more lethal toys, as we call them, to the Killstreaks. Something like the secret drone will just is like purely reconnaissance and stuff like the recon drone as well will help mark targets to help you again. It’s all in the combat space, so it’s pushing players towards other players. But the more lethal big explosions we normally reserve to Killstreaks.

GamesBeat: When you go supine on your back, can you intentionally do that, or do you have to get concussed into that?

Smith: You just crouch and then crouch again. There’s actually some spots in our map too that really lend themselves well for that traversal mechanic with the high metrics and how they’re constructed. But it allows you to almost peak in a different scenario. You are on your back, so it does take a longer time for your gun to come up. So it’s balancing that alongside slide and sprint.

GamesBeat: I saw somebody get me from that position because there were a bunch of bodies on the ground. There’s one guy lying down, but he’s got his gun up. I ignored him because I didn’t expect to see somebody just on the ground like that. I thought he was dead. He surprised me.

Hoppus: We have some subtle little things. The the players highlight will get brighter when they’re in prone, so it should draw your your eye a little bit more. We didn’t want to just pop people and pop people out and make them glow, but they’ll get a little brighter when they’re when they’re in prone to help differentiate between a dead body and a live one.

GamesBeat: I think I liked Transit 213 the most. What what do you guys notice about that one in particular? It’s like the new Shipment.

Smith: We were actually talking about this today in the design room about how for Hardpoint, (Transit 213) is just chaos and fun. There’s some fun routes that you can take where you can actually get on top of some of the busses and get on top of that shed or whatever you want to call it, and get this cool roof advantage until someone finds you up there and shoots you down. But

Hoppus: Had to fight for that. You guys kept telling me not to do so. It’s fun. It’s it’s obviously one of our smaller maps, but I think it offers a play style and in a different, just a different zag. We have maps like Cole and maps like Lotus that are are more typical larger maps that allow you to have those type of traversals and those type of engagement ranges. And then there’s obviously the more intimate shipment style transit maps. Transit Two and Three is one of those that lends itself for that. So there’s players that love it, and there’s players that prefer our more medium to larger size maps.

GamesBeat: Interesting. And then something like I do remember with the contrast between Warzone and the multiplayer that the sniper rifles were nerfed in Warzone. You maybe have to shoot somebody twice sometimes in order to. They can the guns all seem to get nerfed at some point if they’re good. But but like Signal 50, I think, right, would would just be too powerful in Warzone, and if you have the same thing between DMZ and and multiplayer and campaign two. Then like all the

Hoppus: The weapons do the same damage (in both multiplayer and DMZ and the campaign). But the difference in DMZ is getting extra armor plates in (the human players).

GamesBeat: So those armor plates stop the sniper’s bullet?

Hoppus: We have different different vests that affect different things. There’s a vest with a helmet that will mitigate head-shock modifiers available in DMZ. But it’s just too much for us to keep different damage settings per different modes. And even with single player, we’re all shooting the same AI, we need to not make it too hard for ourselves.

Smith: If you if you leveled up your if you love the the cast off like that’s your favorite assault rifle and you love it in core MP and you bring it over to DMZ and it does way less damage, you’re gonna be like I’m used to like four shots of this guy. So obviously there’s some tuning that eventually needs to be done for for stuff like Warzone and DMZ, like we have some sniper rifles like the Asteroth in in Core MP is this huge huge like it’s our long it’s the longest gun that we have in our game that is a one shot kill in Core MP but in Nimbo like DMZ where you have this progression and obviously dying you lose a lot of your gear that’s can’t have the same thing. So it’s it’s like Jeff said, we have armor, health values. So it all we want it to stay consistent and to stay like you you are using the gun that and love, but also fix some of the the gnarly outliers.

GamesBeat: So should players maybe not expect to have a whole lot of changing in the guns then as the seasons go on.

Hoppus: We try not to. Sometimes different attachment combinations pop up that we didn’t we hadn’t accounted for, and that’s usually where we find the things that get out of balance. So just like we did in the second week of the beta, we make little adjustments per weapon rather than global health things. We’re pretty used to fixing or adjusting weapons. It’s usually not trying to reduce the fun of them, but some combination ended up being a little dean powered.

GamesBeat: And I see shipment is scheduled for later. I guess some of this is then to try to reattract people who lapsed out to come back for their favorite map or something like that.

Hoppus: Yeah, it’s funny with Shipment. we see the people that play shipment are the people that play shipment, and and they if if if it’s not there, then they usually play. They don’t really play, and so it doesn’t really affect our other playlists. It’s just a funny little crowd that likes to play Shipman a lot. For this one, we we did a little throwback. So it’s the it’s the same look and setting as the very first shipment, and we found that through the years we’ve lost the organic ground, and then a little and little berms in the back helped helped the gameplay quite a bit. So, and then we’ll have different. We probably shouldn’t be telling all the secrets. There’s different. I guess

GamesBeat: Players can expect that the seasons at least will bring these things that will pull people back into multiplayer?

Hoppus: Our post-launch content is crazy. We were laughing about it yesterday, but I think that maybe we played the launch map so much that we are really into the the seasonal maps. I think some of those are some of our best maps of the seasonal ones. it’s just

Smith: It’s like what’s what’s cool, what’s exciting, worst places we haven’t been before, but also stuff like players players love change and seeing new things, and thinking from like, both from like a setting and like art standpoint, but also from a gameplay standpoint, there’s going to be a lot to look forward to. And

GamesBeat: Then maybe come right down to the last one. So that like the single player in the store in Seoul when the very beginning of the game is that the same as like the Silkworm (multiplayer map)? that’s the same like street. I just wondered how much that happens between single player and places and things that you see in the multiplayer maps.

Hoppus: So the funny story with silkworm and Lotus, the little coastal town. Our art team asked us for maps in those settings, so that they could set up teams to start collecting Korean set dress from and study materials and study stuff that you’d see on streets. And so we we made a more built-up city map with silkworm, and then we made a more rural coastal map with Lotus, and that helped inform our scan teams and our artists to create create all those all those assets. And so it’s a little of the chicken and the egg. But once we had some of those buildings and so forth, we ended up integrating those into Hodgin to help merge the worlds.

I played the game on the PC with an Xbox controller. You can also play it on the PC on Steam or Battle.net, on Xbox Series X/S and on PlayStation 5. The game is also available on the Nintendo Switch 2, marking Call of Duty’s return to a Nintendo platform since 2013 with Call of Duty: Ghosts.

Disclosure: Activision paid my way to an event where I played the full game. This story is the sole responsibility of GamesBeat.

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