Extraction shooters are an enigma in the world of gaming, and now the biggest FPS franchise in the world is diving head-first into it.
Escape From Tarkov brought it to the masses, and games like ARC Raiders and Marathon have iterated on the genre. Each game has added something to the experience or changed it in a way, and Infinity Ward is attempting to do the same in Modern Warfare 4.
With MW4, Call of Duty is back with its second attempt at its DMZ mode, which the devs have dubbed the “action extraction” shooter after its beta in Modern Warfare II back in 2022. Last week, I visited Infinity Ward to play Modern Warfare 4 for a few days, and DMZ is where I spent most of my time.
Approachable and accessible, if you want
I composed my own thoughts about the mode (I think it has a great amount of potential, as I mentioned here today) after playing for several hours, but also got a chance to speak with two of the minds behind it: multiplayer creative director Geoffrey Smith and technical designer Jack Hoppus, and I jumped right into it by getting to the meat of the matter: how do you make this inherently hardcore mode more attractive for casual players?
“I would add another word and just say ‘approachable,'” Smith said when I asked where DMZ was trying to land on the scale between hardcore and casual. “I think that a lot of stuff we did in the (2022 MWII) beta was an attempt to make it the genre more accessible from always being able to revive your other squad mates as long as the last one is alive, and as kind of a buffer to that really hard death and out. Being able to run away and then come back 10 minutes later and still get your teammates up is a dynamic that we haven’t seen elsewhere. From bringing your player back with MIA [to buy back Operators you lose in battle] and progressing, continuing to progress through. We’ve done so many kind of post-mortems and in-depth things of what should we do and how should we adjust things to make it fun and approachable.
Smith said, “as we go we’ll continue to make those adjustments,” but with MW4’s DMZ, Infinity Ward is “trying to boil down what the excitement is and bring that in.”
“I think that we didn’t have as much tension in the beta because of a lack of holding on to the stuff you pull out,” he said. “So it will be interesting to see how that affects people’s anxiety. But I also think that the bounty system really changes the conversation because you can go in and do PvP like crazy, which a lot of the endgame DMZ beta guys were doing. But you can use that same information to stay away from those guys. So it’s an interesting thing where then players become the Lieutenants, and then they become the ones people are going after.”
It was tough for me to judge how PvP elements feel in DMZ as we couldn’t quite nail the feeling of an open server when it was a couple dozen journalists and some QA testers in a match during the hours of game time we had. But according to Hoppus, you will be able to sweat it out in PvP if you want. Or not at all.
“All throughout, if you are these players that just want to do PvP and want to make themselves known in the server, known on the leaderboards that that’s the way they want to play, it’s all tied to your operator,” Hoppus said. “So through your active duty slots you can have an operator that you’re like, ‘this is my guy that I want to use to hunt lieutenants, not players.’ Or ‘this is my guy,’ we have a group of people at the studio that try to do all of the playtests completely stealthed. Suppressed rifles, suppressed pistols, knife executions on AI, and try to get through even some of our hardest POIs completely in stealth and try to go as quiet as they can be. And then you have players that just want to drive a Jeep through the front door of our hardest POI and take down players and high-tier AI. So, it’s kind of playing the way you want to play, but also playtesting.”
Judging from what I did play, and from the overall vibe surrounding DMZ this time around, it feels like Infinity Ward wants this game mode to be played by a variety of skill levels, hopefully without scaring away people who don’t want to go full-on player versus player all the time.
“We don’t want you to go up against crazy bounty squads in PvP and lose all of your gear all the time,” Hoppus said. “That’s not the game we’re trying to make. We’re trying to make something that if you want to play that way, fight other players, you can do that. If you want to just loot, if you want to do story missions, if you want to complete all your orders before even touching that stuff, you can totally go through that content as well.”
DMZ PvE?
Escape From Tarkov, ARC Raiders, Marathon: all have added or are adding PvE-only modes to their game after launch at the request of players. And so, I had to ask the same of DMZ, especially considering that this is the first CoD in many years without a strictly PvE third mode (like Zombies or Spec Ops).
“Yeah, I mean, we definitely have conversations about those things,” Smith said about a potential PvE mode in DMZ. “But we like the mix that we have. There are ways to avoid other players through organic systems and UAVs and a bunch of other things. Through the stealth system, you’re able to kind of even decide how much you want to interact with AI, and the POIs having their own threat levels. That really helps kind of helps you whether you want to have action or not.”
“If there’s a real desire for PvE content, we’d have to have a conversation about it and see what’s healthiest for the game,” he said.
In it for the long haul
Something that many multiplayer games like DMZ suffer from is when players grind through content at a pace that devs can’t keep up with. I asked about that, and the devs feel that seasonal content will be able to stem the tide with new offerings, along with the ability to Prestige your Operator to unlock new powerful Traits.
“I mean, there’s a ton of different long-term progression mechanics in the game, from prestiging your operator to things like the serpentine stuff,” Smith said. “There’s a bunch of different little things that we’re laying in. We’re keeping an eye on that stuff. Our goal is for long-term enjoyment. So we’ll continue to add those things as we go along.”
For example, season one of MW4 drops two weeks after launch on Nov. 6, and it will add a new location called Exo-1 (or X01), and season two will expand the map of Hajin by unlocking the northernmost part of the area, Russia. But Hoppus says that “these interactions you’re having is almost content in and of itself” on a match-by-match basis.
“Because we have the option to if you want PvP, if you want to team up with other operators, you’ll always have these moments where you just drop into the sandbox and by happenstance you’re creating these new like, ‘oh I heard a dude on ProxChat,'” Hoppus said, explaining how each match has the potential to feel quite different (and from what I played, I agree).
“So we’re finding, even at the studio, we’ve played for probably hundreds of thousands of hours of playtesting DMZ, and we’re still having these unique experiences of by happenstance just running into other squads. So, I think that there’s an element to that as well that, even within the same sandbox that we have, there’s always going to be new players hopping in, new stories being made, and having these cool almost one-off experiences that you wouldn’t find in a traditional six-vs-six multiplayer mode.”
DMZ is available in MW4 today in early access for pre-orderers, and for everyone in the full game on Oct. 23.
Activision provided Destructoid with travel and lodging for the review event at Infinity Ward in Los Angeles.
