Call Of Duty: Warzone

Modern Warfare 3

Company

Activision/Raven Software

Duration

1 year

Role

Systems Designer

Duration

Nov 2023 - October 2024

After my 3 month internship with Raven Software I was brought on as a full time Systems Designer for the next installment of Call of Duty Warzone, where I began owning Warzone's meta design systems, specifically challenges and events!

I worked on multiple seasons of Warzone during the era of Modern Warfare 3.

I was the design owner of our daily, weekly, and event challenges.

I built high profile challenges for our highest profile Warzone feature: Champion's Quest.

I worked closely with our partner studios Sledgehammer Games and Beenox.

I designed and balanced challenges for a completely new Warzone exclusive Reward System.

If you want to hear the full story - read on!

Leveling Up

From an Intern to a Full-Timer

More Autonomy, More Responsibility

Graduating from a Systems Design Intern to a full time Systems Designer was great, but I also knew that this meant that the expectations and responsibilities I held needed to grow along with my title.

I took the insights gleaned from my time as an intern, and worked with my design lead to determine in what ways I'd be operating differently.

I was still expected to ask for help, especially with learning new tools.
I needed to work proactively and closely with my Producers and Leads to make sure any issues or blockers were brought to their attention early.
Finding learnings & opportunities to reduce friction in our design process was within my purvue.
Helping others learn how to do work in my domain was highly encouraged, whether it was teaching our QA to use our telemetry tools or showing a Producer how to make simple changes to challenges.

Working on MWIII was an exciting change of pace from my previous stint as an intern!

Live Service Meta Design

My main responsibility in Warzone was designing our meta systems. In other words, I designed the systems that wrapped our core gameplay with smaller games and achievements. Breaking down my tasks, this meant:

I designed the types of activities players would need to do to earn rewards.
- This involved developing an understanding of the game from the player's perspective. What kinds of activities were enjoyable? What kinds of activities were players not aware of, and could we encourage more creative play?
I balanced the durations and difficulties of challenge activities to earn rewards
- This involved talking to players, playtesting daily, using our analytics and telemetry, as well as looking online for any sentiments player had on historical challenges and their difficulty.
I coordinated with our Asset Teams to align the vision for challenges with the rewards being given
- This involved talking to our artists and making sure that I was creating challenges that were on theme with their rewards, or that they had clear direction on the challenges I was making to author properly themed assets.
I maintained lists and documentation on all of my work
- This involved following the conventions of our existing design teams, especially our partner studios, to produce documentation that was easily navigatable and could service the needs of our diverse team.
I supported our engineering team by scripting new challenge tracking logic
- This involved learning our proprietary scripting language (similar to popular high level scripting languages) and building and testing new logic in our builds.
I owned the design and implementation of our seasonal events
- This involved all of the above items, but in service of building high profile challenges that were typically tied to a partnership with some franchise (like The Boys) or a holiday (CODmas).

Responsibilities

Where I owned my work

Features I Worked On

Feature 1: Daily & Weekly Challenges

A staple of most Live Service games. Daily and Weekly challenges are particular activities selected for the player that change based on a daily or weekly cadence.

I was responsible for maintaining the existing designs of our 3 challenge Daily System, and building new Weekly Challenges as our new seasons were released.

Specifically, I:

Built and ppdated our daily challenges to feature content in our game that was introduced (new items, new features)
Built new weekly challenges while keeping consistent with the existing weekly challenge design philosophies
Worked with our partner studio Sledgehammer Games to refactor the way challenge difficulty was communicated
- This was particularly helpful for event challenges, where players would clearly be making choices to complete an event challenge in Warzone or Zombies or Multiplayer.
Maintained documentation on Dailies and Weeklies
Supported QA with providing instructions on using our in-house tooling to test challenges that were in development

The UI for our Weekly Challenges (as seen from Modern Warfare III)

Feature 2: Champions Quest

Arguably one of the hardest multiplayer activities in the history of multiplayer gaming, Champions' Quest is a feature of Warzone that lets a team attempt to destroy the entire map by detonating a nuke, while over 100 other players try to stop them.

I was responsible for designing and implementing the reward system for Champions' Quest.

This was an incredibly high profile player activity where I was responsible for:

Implementing the challenges to provide key rewards to players based on their role in Champions' Quest (detonating the nuke, defusing the nuke, or being in the game when the nuke detonates).
Working closely with our UI and gameplay engineers to make sure this exclusive challenge system had clear signifiers and feedback (on-screen splashes and front end UI elements).

A player viewing the in-game contract trigger to begin the Champion's Quest

Feature 3: Seasonal Events

One of the common offerings of most live service games are Seasonal Events. These are limited time offerings that feature gameplay changes as well as opportunities to engage with those gameplay changes to earn rewards. These events are sometimes tied to a franchise partnership or a holiday.

I was responsible for designing and implementing seasonal challenges for these events for Warzone.

Designing and balancing Warzone seasonal events to be a fair comparison between the Multiplayer and Zombies challenges in terms of time-to-complete.
Collaborating with our asset teams to make sure challenge theming was aligned with reward assets made by our artists
Implementing and validating new challenge tracking scripting for custom event-specific gameplay features alongside our gameplay engineering team.
Leveraged historical KPI data from past events and longitudinal challenge systems (dailies/weeklies) to identify problematic player activities as well as activities with high appeal & low friction.

An event for Modern Warfare 3 with the theming of "radioactive mutations"

Feature 4: Warzone Rewards System

An exclusive reward system to Warzone, this reward system provided exclusive Warzone cosmetic rewards by engaging with themed activities within Warzone.

I was responsible for designing and implementing this new system with the support of our Online Engineering and Asset Team.

Designing and balancing the offerings of the Warzone Reward Challenges to be representative of the holistic Warzone experience.
Collaborating with our asset teams to make sure challenge theming was aligned with reward assets made by our artists
Implementing and validating new challenge tracking scripting for custom event-specific gameplay features alongside our gameplay engineering team.
Making data requests for our Data Science team to set up a dashboard for evaluating the performance of this reward system for use by future contributors to this feature.

Warzone Rewards UI for Season 5

Reflection

Where I look back on my experience

Lessons Learned

This was officially my first full time game design position, and I was lucky to have had the responsibility for owning various challenge systems, which over the the course of Modern Warfare 3, my challenges have been completed by hundreds of thousands of players, millions of times.

This role challenged me (pun intended) to improve the hard and soft design skills I had begun to hone during my time at school and my internship:

Teamwork makes the dreamwork. I relied on many other people to do my job as a challenge designer effectively. This included getting data from a data scientist, getting engineering support from a producer, or getting senior design's perspective on challenge designs I was unsure about. The best outcome for all of the features I was supporting was when I brought the subject matter experts in when I needed them.

Data-informed and data-driven. Knowing when to use my gut or use hard data to make design decisions is something I learned during my first couple seasonal events. Sometimes data does lie, and creating activities for players strictly based on data doesn't account for the "fun factor" that makes a lot of meta systems appealing. On the flip side, balancing activities using hard data versus my own anecdotal experience provided a safe guard that I was designing systems for our diverse player base, and not for myself.

A good designer is a great housekeeper. The majority of my work relied heavily on my ability to stay organized and maintain good records, especially as I became an entrenched design contributor in the meta-system space of our game. People needed to know they could rely on me to know what was happening, and if I wasn't around or happened to not be available, they could find records of my work easily.

Solve the problems that exist. Working in Live Ops has taught me the value of solving problems with the constraint of time at the forefront of my mind. I had to prevent myself on multiple occasions from piroritizing issues I thought were going to happen in the future (such as tracking new and unique bits for features that were freshly released) and focus on cleaning out the issues and bugs that were plaguing our game in the present or immediate future. The problems never stop, and we can always improve our product's design, but determining which problems need to be prioritized and having the discipline to stay focused on them is a skill I honed during my time on Modern Warfare 3.

I'm really grateful for my time on this project, as well as my team giving me the opportunity to take ownership of a major part of our Live Service design at an early point in my career. I'll be taking the insights I've gained from this project and applying it to my next one!