Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 | Campaign Interview with Infinity Ward

Is it really the end of Modern Warfare? Let's hear about that and more!

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• Interview

Győző "FairyEmpire" Baki

1 minute ago

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In our visit to Infinity Ward’s studio in Los Angeles, we not only tested the whole of Modern Warfare 4 on PC and even on Switch 2, but also had various opportunities to chat with the developers. This includes a lovely talk with Alex Norris, Associate Design Director and Justin Harris, Lead Narrative Designer about the game’s campaign. Let’s get to it, shall we?

This interview has been lightly edited for clarity. There are some story spoilers in here, so beware!

Győző: Jumping straight in – I noticed the game is in two parts. The first half is jumping back and forth between a lot of iconic locations from Mumbai to Paris, while the second part of the game is a lot more contained, South Korea, North Korea, and not a lot of jumping around. What’s the reasoning behind this?

Alex: It’s definitely designed with that intentionality of giving you gameplay variety right off the bat to try to get our hooks in you as a player and keep you propelled through the whole experience. We want you to be able to experience a bit of globetrotting from Price‘s perspective, but also feel like you’re grounded and tied into this new cast of characters, the grunts, the infantry that are in the Korean Peninsula.

Justin: We have these two main threads that are happening as you pointed out. But I think towards your point of they feel more contained at the end, we specifically designed it where these story threads have to converge. We had that in mind early and kept pinging back to that as a point of, yes, they feel kind of separate. But one is kind of leading to how the other came to be, and then we get to see that moment happen, and then we lead to an epic conclusion.

Győző: I’m going to jump to a different question than the one I was going to ask since you said epic conclusion. Marketing-wise, this game has been sold as the end of the Modern Warfare saga. Would you commit to confirming that the next game is not going to be a Modern Warfare game?

Justin: I would say that that’s way too far in the future to even think about right now. This is a conclusion for this storyline, for some of these characters. That’s what we set out to do from the start. And I think that we did that.

Győző: So the story is basically over, but it also leads into DMZ. A lot of the previous games, including Modern Warfare II and III, but also the Black Ops games, had a lot of pretty big story moments happen, even in the post-season stuff, be it in Warzone, be it in Endgame, be it in Spec Ops. Are you still going to continue the story in a way in the next year or so?

Alex: Yes, there are operators and characters that you’ll see from the single player campaign that are continuing their story, continuing to fight for control of Hajin City and that section of the Korean Peninsula. The battle goes on.

Justin: You sum it up pretty well. The story, I’ll dive into it a little bit. The story is going to continue into DMZ. One of the fun things we were able to do is determine that early. We were able to craft the narrative of this game to where there was more of a foundational solid piece that players that get to experience and understand the reason as to what and why the things that are happening in Hajin are happening in Hajin.

Alex: We were very excited to create the setup of the DMZ. How did this place become irradiated? Why is it all abandoned? Where did all the people go? Getting to tell that story in the single player side was really awesome for us.

Győző: There’s a lot of popular media about South Korea right now. Obviously, they’re big in the pop industry. There are massive TV shows, massive dramas. What exactly pushed you towards Korea?

Alex: When we finished Modern Warfare II back in 2022, we started to explore, we started to prototype and do our research and development for this game. And we wanted to go somewhere different. We wanted to branch away from where we had been. We wanted to go someplace we hadn’t actually experienced yet. And when we started to look at the Korean Peninsula, we saw a number of factors that were drawing us in. There’s this war that is unresolved that’s been going on for 70 years. You’ve got a military buildup that is on the Northern side that is totally capable of unleashing havoc on the cities on the South side. You have conscripted soldiers in the South and in the North, so people that are having their choices made for them. And as well as the largest US overseas base is in South Korea at Camp Humphrey.

We’ve got all the pieces that we need there. It’s 60 miles south of the DMZ. You’ve got American Marines that are there that have been training with the ROK Korean Marines for decades as well. Training on amphibious landing in case it might need to happen. We’ve got a lot of reference for that. As we discovered these things, we were just totally drawn into that space as a fitting universe for us.

Justin: We had never actually been there! And it’s a war that has never officially ended. So we thought, what would that look like if that were to ignite today? And with the modern capabilities that both sides have, how would that play out? That’s something that, the more we looked into it, the more we’re like there’s some really interesting things to explore here.

Győző: I have to say, I kind of expected you to keep Mads Mikkelsen around longer. I know he must be pretty expensive, but it seems quite definitive.

Alex: Yeah, he’s not in another tank, he’s definitely definitive.

Justin: There’s a level of finality that we wanted to have, with certain characters and their arcs in the story. We wanted to make sure that there was no, ‘was he in that tank’ moment? There’s a level of finality that we wanted to have, with certain characters and their arcs in the story. We wanted to make sure that there was no, ‘was he in that tank’ moment?

Gyozo: There’s a lot of cool tech in the game, from the weather to the ray tracing. Which tech do you think best served the narrative?

Alex: The weather was awesome. Getting that in, I remember old Call of Duties having pretty good weather. And we’ve been in a lot of dry environments for our last few. So having that, it provides an emotion. If it’s raining and it’s gloomy, you’re going to feel a little gloomier yourself. in the right moments. If the characters are dipping into freezing cold water and then coming out into a snowstorm, you’re going to feel a little cold yourself. I think that’s one of the great tech improvements we’ve had for this game, for sure.

Justin: I’m not going to speak a lot about the tech, but I will say that from the narrative side, it’s character in conflict, and how there is all that conflict, and the forces of antagonism that your characters come up against. In a war game, that could be pretty easy. There’s a guy with a gun over there. That’s a force of antagonism. But being able to play up the weather side of it, a force of antagonism can be stranded behind enemy lines freezing, and the weather is a huge factor. Knowing how people might rely on each other just during those moments. You don’t think about that because we’re so lucky to not be in a conflict like that. But when you get to designing it, something as simple as the cold can play a big factor.

Győző: There were moments in the campaign where you could make choices. I would assume, I obviously only played it once, so I haven’t seen it, but I’m going to assume the scene in the North Korean village, is going to play out pretty much the same, given how it ends. Are there any branching parts in the story that actually change depending on what you do?

Alex: In the mission you’re discussing, your choices lead you to your fate at the end of that mission. Anytime we have choices, those are represented within the mission itself, at the end. I do recommend if you have time to go back and play the mission again and take it from a different play style than you might have taken it this time, and you’ll see that there’s a few options at the end that you might not have experienced.

Győző: What are your favourite parts of the campaign? Anything you’re particularly proud of?

Alex: Getting this brawler system in, where you’re fighting Makarov. When we started, we wanted to make boss fights and boss fights are really difficult. And we said, well, what’s going to be unique? How can we do boss fights with Makarov and Ghost that aren’t just shooting each other with 1000 bullets. That was something that we endeavoured to conquer early in the project. It was very challenging to put that system together. Tons of animations, tons of scripting and programming to make it function.

it’s something that we were up against, but we wanted to beat the **** out of Makarov. So we just did it. We went after it. It was a real difficult thing to get the Makarov fight right, but once we got that, the ghost fight goes, how do we escalate this? Bring in the knives! It was a good, fun way to explore things. But that was a beast.

Justin: I would say on the narrative side, this is the largest cast that we’ve ever had in a Call of Duty game. And that can be very daunting, casting the right people and seeing what the chemistry is going to be like on stage and between the actors. I have to say I feel that the chemistry between the South Korean squad – I’m very proud of that. I think that those actors were awesome and they were able to just kind of like click with each other immediately, which was great.

Győző: It almost feels like the new squad might lead to something. Obviously, a lot of the known names of the Modern Warfare franchise have been ‘dealt with’ in one way or another, but we actually have a new fresh team that, who knows?!

Justin: I think that’s great. Who knows? We love them, but yeah, time will tell.

Alex: You should expect to see a couple of them in DMZ as the story continues.

Győző: I was really impressed by the scale of the game; Paris in particular. You can just drive and drive for miles!

Alex: The art team crushed it on that. When we made Modern Warfare 2, there was a bit of a viral story about the Amsterdam mission. People were comparing it with their phones. And I’m like, that’s just a block. It’s a corner of Amsterdam. The art team went and made Paris block after block, mile after mile. It’s huge. And it just feels like you’re there. I am wowed by what they did there. Super cool mission. It seems like it would be a waste to not reuse that. I always want to make some random ‘CODware‘ at the end of a project, because there’s all this stuff that nobody’s seen, nobody went down this way. It’s really tempting.

And that’s the end of our interview! Be sure to check out our impressions of this very campaign we just talked about, the complete review of Modern Warfare 4, and also the interview we did with Joe Cecot and Jackie Reynolds about Multiplayer and DMZ!

A huge thanks to Alex Norris and Justin Harris for their time, to Activision for setting us up with this review event and interview opportunity, and to our very own Kat for helping with transcribing the interview. See you all on Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4, launching on October 23rd for PC, Xbox Series X|S, PlayStation 5 and Nintendo Switch 2!