Call Of Duty: Warzone

Modern Warfare II

Company

Activision/Raven Software

Duration

3 months

Role

Systems Design Intern

Duration

May 2023 - August 2023

During my 2nd year at DigiPen I was hired by Activision/Raven Software to work on Call Of Duty: Warzone.

Call of Duty Warzone is a free-to-play Battle Royale 1st Person Shooter that is alongside Call Of Duty: Modern Warfare II.

I was hired during the 3rd season of Warzone.

I interfaced with over 35 people across over 5 teams.

I worked fully remote for this internship.

I took responsibility for the design and implemention 2 quality of life features and 1 new game feature.

All 3 features I worked on were greenlit and playtested during internal playtests.

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

Onboarding

Where I joined the team

Proactive Relationship Building

When I was hired, there was the traditional ramp-up while they were instructing me on how to work in-engine, incorporating me into their production pipeline, and assigning me tasks and responsibilities.

I took action and set up 1 on 1s with every member of my team, as well as teams my manager told me I'd work with. I was able to meet with various design teams (UX/Level), leadership (Creative Directors/Game Directors), engineering (UI/Gameplay) and more. By prioritizing building relationships with the teams early, I became a friendly face that people knew, which made it much easier to collaborate with them on my work.

Screenshot of Call Of Duty Warzone Infil

I embodied a core tenet of CoD Warzone in my work at Raven: Teamwork!

Learning The Tools

With a 3 month summer internship, I had a big challenge ahead of me. I had to:

Learn multiple in-house tools that included versioning, scripting, assets, loot management, and progression systems
Integrate myself into the team's design and development pipelines such as brainstorming, feedback, and playtests.
Learn about the products, values, opportunities and its challenges faced by Raven Software as well as Activision.

Learning all of this on my own would not only be a huge challenge, but the time it would take to navigate to the right places to get the information I needed would limit the time I actually had to deliver value to Warzone.

I leveraged the relationships I built to ask for help:

Technical/System designers on my team accelerated my education in various in-house tools, and they forwarded me to the right engineers to solve issues they didn't understand
My manager, producers, and leads in other teams helped me identify opportunities for me to be an active participant in the studios design and development processes such as UR playtesting, feedback sessions, and inter-departmental meetings.
Directors & long-standing team members helped me understand the challenges that plagued Warzone in the past, opportunities that were currently being explored, and how the various studios working on CoD were trying to align their work with the overall vision for CoD.

Responsibilities

Where I owned my work

Features I Worked On

Because of the nature of my work at Raven Software, I cannot give details about the particular projects I worked on. But I designed and developed 3 features, 2 quality of life Improvements and 1 new feature.

This is a character that was released while I was working on my assigned features!

Feature 1: Updating Warzone's Gulag

In Warzone's Battle Royale, players who are eliminated in the game are transported to a small arena (the Gulag) where they can fight another eliminated player for the chance to respawn in the map.

I was given full responsibility to design and prototype a feature from the ground up to improve the appeal of the Gulag by leveraging spawned loot during a Gulag fight.

Although I cannot specifically talk about the details of my work due to an NDA, some tasks I undertook to design and prototype this feature were:

Collaborating with the system design team to get feedback on an initial pitch
Including and leveraging our UX team to identify dependencies and risks.
Informing my decisions around loot using analytics from other parts of the game concerning loot.
Managing and updating documentation
Learning how to use a new game engine, and scripting desired prototype behavior to test
Participating in internal playtests to gather data on the feature
Advocating and pitching my design to my team and Creative Director to get greenlit

The "Blacksite" Gulag Arena

Feature 2: Updating the Gas Mask

In Warzone's Battle Royale, players are forced into combat due to a shrinking arena created by toxic gas. Players can protect themselves for a brief period if they manage to find a gas mask, allowing them to traverse into toxic gas without taking damage for some time.

I was given full responsibility to implement a quality of life feature and have it internally playtested. This was a more technical task, and I was excited to script some updated behavior for the gas mask and collect feedback on it.

Although I cannot specifically talk about the details of my work due to an NDA, some tasks I undertook to design and prototype this feature were:

Getting local feedback from gameplay engineering, system design, and UX design
Managing versioned code and abiding by engineering coding standards
Referencing design documentation not written by me, and using it to implement the desired behavior
Pointing out possible opportunities and risks with the current implementation

A character with a gas mask on in the gas.

Feature 3: Updating the Gas Grenade

In Call Of Duty, the gas grenade is an item that can be used to blanket an area with non-toxic gas. This gas forces players to cough, preventing them from aiming their weapons accuratively.

I was given full responsibility to implement a quality of life feature around the gas grenade and have it internally playtested. This was once again a more technical task, and I was excited to work on another player facing feature and get it playtested by our internal team!

Although I cannot specifically talk about the details of my work due to an NDA, some unique tasks I undertook to design and prototype this feature were:

Watching real player gameplay in formal User Research studies and using that data to inform my decisions
Exploring design edge cases with a keen eye for game balance

Reflection

Where I look back on my experience

Lessons Learned

This was my first experience working in the games industry, and it's hard to imagine an experience that could have gone better. I was given a lot of responsibility with a lot of support to do my best work. As a result I learned from my mistakes and felt emboldened as a developing designer because of my victories.

Looking at Warzone and knowing that there are features in that game touching millions of players that I was wholly responsible for is a unique feeling, and it would be too soon before I experienced that again.

The important takeaways from my internship were

Pleasantness predicts success. Being smart is great, but having great working relationships with my team made my work leagues more enjoyable and allowed me to move faster and ask for help without hesitation. My ability to leverage my soft skills such as diplomacy, transparency, accountability, and kindness was a big predictor of my success at Raven - and created lasting relationships and mentorships as a result.

Constraints are what make a problem real. In the academic space, I was used to having limited constraints in my work. In my personal work, constraints were typically non-existant. During my internship, recognizing the limitations of teams due to time or technology was critical in delivering designs that were likely to succeed. Recognizing this limitations early in all of my future projects will be critical for my success as a designer.

Money matters. The business of the games industry is fascinating, and having the opportunity to interface with the business unit at Activision gave me insight on why some designs look great on paper, yet fail in industry. Recognizing that in the games industry, design and business are tightly wound around each other is a learning moment I could have only gotten from working in the industry. As a designer I will need to do more than just design systems that predict player engagement, but also balance that same designso it can predict financial success for the company that pays the bills.

My career is just starting. Having the opportunity to meet so many veteran designers let me imagine what my career would look like 5 to 10 years down the road. I'm excited for what I see, and I can't wait to begin my official career as a game designer.