The weekly battle for the “Most Played Game on Xbox Live” continues this week with Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare still holding the #1 spot for 4 weeks straight and managing to keep Halo 3 from retaking the throne. I had a chance to talk with quite a few of the Bungie guys at GDC this past week, mostly at the Microsoft party, and I could tell that neither one of us were going to slip off the top of the charts without a fight.
With the release of our Feature patch and DLC coming closer and closer every day, and plenty of new playlist ideas being thrown around for Call of Duty 4 multiplayer I know we can keep the fight going for a long long time. I love these weekly number checks because it provides a great opportunity to give you guys a weekly update on how things are going here at the studio with those updates, so with that said…
I got word that the Xbox 360 Feature patch could be ‘very very close’, I can’t tell you exactly when because they haven’t passed on that information but apparently certification went fantastic and I was given the Green light to take care of some things that I have to do before it goes live to you guys, which means good things. I’m not going to get any hopes up, but I hope to be seeing some new Kill Cams by the weekend if we’re lucky. Don’t hold me to that though, but I have a good feeling about it.
The Ps3 Feature Patch has officially made it’s way off to Sony and has been going through the certification process, this one should be a rather quick turnaround hopefully so I’m not expecting too much delay on this at all. I will keep you updated as much as I can on it’s progress.
Hit the jump for DLC talk…
As for DLC, their coming along great. We have a DLC Play test at 5:30 today which is essentially where we all jump in and play games on the new maps. QA plays with us so they test for bugs and glitches, while we play more for the design aspect. For example one of our guys found this killer sniping spot on one of the new maps which is really open where you could basically see around the entire map if on a certain rooftop, so we’re going to jump in there and see if we feel it’s too overpowered or just a really sweet sniper spot. To be fair, the map he found it on is a huge map ripe for snipers anyway, so it may not be that big a deal as there’s plenty of ground coverage and alternate ‘covered’ paths to take.
During this DLC test we’re going to be recording some video of one of the maps for SpikeTV / GameTrailers that I did an interview with last week talking about this specific map. It’s a bit further along with the rests and is a special treat to some of our “loyal” Call of Duty players that I know a lot of you are going to love, especially you Sgt. Payback. 
I also have to take three screenshots of the new maps for later on when we start doing promotion, so I have to start scouting out some good angles in the maps to take shots of. We typically like to get a key map landmark in each screenshot on loading screens as you could probably tell that really identifies it as THAT MAP. Which is what I mean by good angle, for example, when you see Bloc, you know it’s bloc because of the statue in the middle and ferris wheel, or Crash because of the Helicopter, and so on and so forth.
Other than that we’re looking at new playlists ideas, possible new gametypes, rulesets, things we can do separate from new DLC that we’re already working on that will keep the game fresh and new for players. Those will probably start showing up a little after the feature patch hits. So if you have ideas for cool playlists keep sending them in for consideration as that’s something we can constantly change, add, take away, etc at any time. I think I already have my favorite that we’ll try out first…
Tags: call of duty 4, cod4, dlc, gametypes, halo 3, maps, modern warfare, multiplayer, new, playlists, xbox live
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