Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare Is Purpose-Built to Tempt You to Master New Things

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Sledgehammer Games co-founder Michael Condrey chats Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare’s multiplayer depth.

By Nathan Lawrence

It’s no secret the Call of Duty franchise isn’t renowned for having the longest campaigns in gaming history. On top of this, there’s not a whole lot of incentive to go back and play through the solo experiences beyond the first time. In terms of longevity, the franchise relies heavily on the competitive multiplayer portion of each yearly entry.
That’s not to say that Sledgehammer Games – Call of Duty’s latest custodian – isn’t forging a compelling single-player experience; Kevin Spacey in a motion-captured lead performance goes a long way towards a safe prediction on that front. The real trick for Call of Duty developers year in, year out is to tweak the multiplayer formula enough to make it new, without breaking the fervent fan base’s expectations of how successive Call of Duty games should play.

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Sledgehammer has taken its namesake to the safer multiplayer iterations of yesteryear and drastically changed the way movement works in Advanced Warfare’s multiplayer by way of exosuits. Advanced Warfare’s competitive multiplayer isn’t resting solely on exosuits, though, with plenty of variation on offer for multi fans to enjoy, with a greater depth of customisation. The all-new ‘Pick 13’ feature builds on what Treyarch introduced with ‘Pick 10’ in Black Ops II, empowering players with the ability to tailor their created classes to specific play styles. Sub out score streaks completely, or use a wild card to add a fourth. Lovers of score streaks are further rewarded by the option to customise them with specific behaviours that modify how they operate in the field. It’s a fantastic opportunity to feel as though you have the customisation space to personalise multiple classes to play differently across modes, in a variety of digital combat roles.
On top of this, there are close to 350 weapon variants out of the box, improving the likelihood that there’s a digital death-dealer for everyone. Better still, players can now immediately test a selected weapon in an instantly-loading virtual firing range with the press of a button from within the ‘Create-A-Class’ screen. This means you don’t have to impact your KDR to field test a weapon, only to discover it’s not for you. Then there’s the zeitgeist introduction of loot (called ‘Supply Drops’) across three categories – weapons, gear and reinforcements – across three rarities: enlisted, professional and elite.

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Much like Activision’s other big 2014 hybrid FPS, Destiny, the type of rarity classification for a loot drop will determine its specs. Unlike Destiny, however, Advanced Warfare’s loot system won’t feel like a completely randomised affair, according to Michael Condrey, co-founder of Sledgehammer Games.

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Our loot system is reward-based, partly driven off of time played, like you’ve seen in other games, such as Team Fortress [2].

“Our loot system is reward-based, partly driven off of time played, like you’ve seen in other games, such as Team Fortress [2] from Valve,” Condrey tells us. “It’s also driven out of challenges. The idea is that every time you sit down to play Call of Duty, we want you to feel rewarded for your performance, and that can be just for playing or for going after unique challenges in the match. The idea is the more you play and the more you earn, the more your character looks like a badass from all the stuff he’s got, and the more you’re finding weapons built for your unique play style, with the idea that it’s going to continue to drive excitement and engagement for players.”
As for the loot categories, weapons and gear are self-explanatory, whereas reinforcements are a bit more abstract. What form might reinforcement loot drops take?
“Imagine you’re playing a match and you get a piece of loot and you open it up and it says, ‘Hey, you’ve opened up a rare score streak, you’re going to have the Warbird ready to go in your next match, or an extra perk,” says Condrey. Evidently, the Pick 13 mechanic isn’t the only feature of Advanced Warfare that has a wild card.

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The chances are good that returning Call of Duty fans will be eager to see how Advanced Warfare plays in familiar modes such as Team Deathmatch, Domination, and Kill Confirmed. Every new Call of Duty entry introduces at least one new multiplayer mode but, with the exception of Kill Confirmed from Modern Warfare 3, new modes don’t tend to have staying power. Sledgehammer is eager to change that with Advanced Warfare.
“We started nearly three years ago doing rapid prototypes around new game modes for multiplayer and went through dozens and dozens of versions,” explains Condrey. “We spent a lot of time looking at other game modes outside of first-person [shooters], brainstorming new ways we wanted to play, taking permutations of popular modes that we have now and really trying to push them in new avenues. It’s been a big effort to try and find something that we think is going to be that tier-one level of a new game mode.”

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We started nearly three years ago doing rapid prototypes around new game modes for multiplayer and went through dozens and dozens of versions.

That push for a new mode resulted in Uplink, which plays like a faster-paced bastard child of Halo’s Oddball and Battlefield 4’s Obliteration. Instead of a bomb or skull, though, players must vie for possession of a single drone that removes the carrying player’s ability to shoot; but it can be thrown at enemies to stop them from firing. The satellite must then be ferried to an uplink bubble to score a point for your team.
“It’s [a] very eSports version of a Call of Duty game mode,” says Condrey, and from my time with it, I’m inclined to agree that it certainly has that potential if the hardcore player base embraces it.
On the topic of eSports players, Sledgehammer brought in Call of Duty multiplayer veterans to help balance the game across the board. One of the most important balancing acts was in terms of how the exosuits impacted the tried-and-proven three-lane map design.
“We had to figure out how you could actually extend those lanes vertically in a way that aesthetically made sense,” Condrey tells us. “We had to make it so that, with the use of boost jump, you could get to rooftops, but that wouldn’t give you full domination of being able to see the full map. Some of our early map designs worked really well with the three-lane design, [but] quickly became a [game of] king of the hill. It was a race to the highest point on the map, and if you and your team could get there and lock it down, you would just dominate.”
This meant going back to the drawing board after receiving input from eSports contenders that are skilled at exploiting map design to their advantage.
“We had to break lines of sight, we had to make flows very easy to navigate as you went vertical and ran across rooftops and dropped down in other lanes,” says Condrey.
The result is an exosuit that now facilitates shifting between lanes in a more efficient way, which results in an even faster-paced experience with fewer obvious map chokepoints now that players can break line of sight by taking advantage of evasion tactics on the Y-axis.

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As fantastic as the exosuit addition is, it also adds a level of additional complexity that may further deter multiplayer-shy franchise fans from joining the online foray. This has been taken into consideration for Advanced Warfare.
“We took it to heart that we wanted to have an onboarding experience that was pretty intuitive to players,” Condrey tells us. “In the campaign itself, there’s a really great level that is really meant to introduce all of the new ways to play in an elegant way. It’s not a training level. It’s much more elegantly woven into the narrative in a way that allows you to experience the level itself, while you’re learning. It doesn’t feel like your traditional gamification of the tutorial, but certainly we’re taking the time to make sure that players can quickly understand new ways to play.”
It also helps that the exosuit controls feel like a natural extension of what has been experienced before in Call of Duty: it’s evolution sans complication. Thankfully, there’s more than just a properly integrated tutorial, too.

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[T]he Combat Readiness Program… is a really easy entry into true multiplayer. It’s a very low-intimidation way to play online with friends.

“We’ve also introduced a new mode in multiplayer,” says Condrey. “It’s called the Combat Readiness Program, which is a really easy entry into true multiplayer. It’s a very low-intimidation way to play online with friends that gives you the time to really master their [the exosuit’s] movements, without any of the sort of things that might be intimidating.”
In practical terms, the removal of these daunting “things” translates to the stripping away of competitive multiplayer elements that have the potential to offer negative reinforcement. That means no kill-cam, no end-of-match stats screen and even voice chat is disabled so less-than-friendly so-called teammates (de-emphasis on the ‘mates’ part) can’t berate your performance, either. There’s also positive reinforcement in the mode.
“We gift score streaks,” says Condrey. “As you play over time, you get score streaks, so you can feel them out and you get to practice with them. There’s no ranking or levelling or XP earned, so a lot of the really competitive players aren’t going to spend time in this mode. It’s set up with some humans and with some bots playing together, so you’re always having a chance to practice and learn, and there are a lot of rewards that just celebrate your personal accomplishment.”
Whether you’re yet to try Call of Duty’s competitive multiplayer or are a seasoned veteran eager to exosuit up in Sledgehammer’s first franchise entry at the helm, Advanced Warfare promises to entice you to at least try what you haven’t before. That could be making the boost jump from solo to multi, subbing out your favourite weapon for something new, or helping to popularise a new game mode. Whatever your Call of Duty flavour, you’re destined to be tempted to strafe outside the box, with mechanics designed to encourage and support as you do so.

Nathan Lawrence is a freelance games journalist based in Australia. You can chat with him on Twitter here, and while you’re at it, why not catch up with the whole IGN Australia team on Facebook and Twitter?

Originally written and published by at IGN PS3. Click here to read the original story.