Gah - I’m finally back to twittering and blogging again after being pulled into my shell for the last few weeks. The time spent away has been productive, regretfully not the kind of progress I can talk about, as the last two weeks have been mainly focused on meetings, planning, brainstorming, and work on our future project.
In regards to Call of Duty 4, we just finished up our latest promotion with the PS3 and 360’s Double XP and Variety Map Pack sale which was a huge success. It pushed us well over 2 Million Map Packs sold on 360 and made us the #1 most sold DLC on both platforms. Thanks to everyone who picked up the map pack.
Oh, International PS3 users: I almost forgot. Our international users on the PS3, you have not been forgotten. We’re currently working on bringing the Half off Map Pack promotion to you as well, it’s just taking a bit longer to get it all set-up with SCEE and Asia but it is happening. Just so you know, you won’t miss out on the deal.
I also wanted to let those with the Game of the Year edition, who have been attempting to redeem your free map pack token, that we’ve been going back and forth with Microsoft on getting us those tokens to refill the database as fast as we can and discussing how they can improve their ridiculously complex and time-wasting token distribution system in the future. Essentially it’s the most needlessly bureaucratic and mindnumbling extensive procedure you’ve ever seen. It’s a serious joke, and not the funny kind, but we’re doing everything we can to get more tokens from them and to you. I’m sure the process of creating randomly generated strings of numbers and letters is complex something well deserving of the month (and counting) it’s taken to supply them. On the PS3 side, no problems. Their token process was quick and painless and GOTY tokens are fully stocked. /rant
The last bit of COD4 news is the playlists; which are currently in a holding pattern in MP design territory. They’re working on the issues I spoke about several weeks ago where the gametypes needed some gameplay balancing (i.e. Spawn Camping in Second Chance SD, Round ends too quick in Sudden Death Sabatoge). So at this point, I’m not going to make the same mistake twice and just hold off on saying anything until they’re completly finished. So…. just know we’re working on them and once they’re amazingly fun and finished, I’ll let you know. they’re coming out. Bummer. I know, but despite my willingness to cave under the sheer crave for the new playlists the MP Design team refuses to let anything out of their grasp until it is completely up to standard with their very high bar of quaility for multiplayer in Call of Duty 4…. and I don’t blame them.
I recently talked with IGN’s Hilary Goldstein regarding the development of Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare; taking a look back at what could have been, why we chose to make it how it is, and changes that you may see in the future to the game. We touched on a lot of great subjects from vehicles in multiplayer to how the team finds inspiration for missions and future DLC maps.
