When the development team at Infinity Ward unveiled Verdansk’s massive play area for Call of Duty: Warzone, they saw it as a starting point. After what Infinity Ward’s game director Jack O’Hara described as a short break, they turned their attention to building their next map – Al Mazrah, Call of Duty’s biggest battle royale map to date, and Battlegrounds’ November 16 release. “Warzone 2.0” was released on .
“We started the map after Verdansk,” O’Hara said. “We took a little breather from that map, and then we started laying the groundwork for the next map, which was Al Mazrah. It was an opportunity to improve on what we did last time, and to build on all the lessons Opportunity.“
In the months and years since “Warzone” debuted in March 2020, O’Hara and the team at Infinity Ward and Call of Duty developer Raven Software have watched players take part in and around the fictional city of Verdansk, from one end to the next Traversing to one another, being propelled by a cloud of deadly gas while shrinking the playing area, forcing the remaining players to move closer together.
Now, those years of observations have been embodied in Infinity Ward’s latest work. Al Mazrah is a combination of two elements, O’Hara said. It starts with the creativity of the developers, who have stitched together 18 points of interest into one giant playground, designed to delight players with unique and unexpected environments. The second element is the information they collect, including how players approach the battle royale map and how they deploy the mapmaking tools available to them.
“When we first did Verdansk, we were dealing with new technology and a new set of tools to make it,” O’Hara said. “So there was definitely something about it when we were making Verdansk, well, we wished we could have changed that, but it all turned out fine.”
Al Mazrah will serve as the home base for both the “Warzone 2.0” battle royale mode and the new open world DMZ mode, in which players will attempt to complete mission objectives and successfully extract while battling opposing players and AI soldiers. As such, the city and its surroundings will tell a story while also providing a sort of sandbox for the player.
In a conversation with The Washington Post, O’Hara and Raven Software associate creative director JJ Williams detailed what players can expect from certain points of interest around the map, as well as throughout Al Mazrah.
The Observatory, originally from the Modern Warfare 3 multiplayer map Dome, is the vantage point of Al Mazrah. From the top of the hill, players can survey the ground beneath their feet, making it a preferred perch for snipers, while also making ascending from below points of interest quite challenging.
But building a fan-favorite multiplayer map into a battle royale mega-map isn’t as simple as it seems. While O’Hara said the familiarity of the multiplayer map will draw players in, and that the developers knew the area was a battleground between two teams of six, they needed to expand the surrounding area.
“It’s looking at how the two teams are going to battle it out,” O’Hara said. “How are they going to come into contact with each other? What’s the content of the fight … what’s the way they move through that space? Everything comes together. You want logical, negative spaces between buildings, you want everything to fit in there. And then, of course, you have to, you know, make it work in the frame, you have to make sure Art looks good and so on.”
However, players who like to occupy the commanding heights may not be able to stay in the observatory for too long. With “Warzone 2.0″‘s new multi-turn mechanic–in which there may be multiple safe zones in the intruding deadly gas–the game might kick players out if they get a little too comfortable. Additionally, Williams said the mapmakers are incentivizing players to push out from strong locations like Observatories by including Strongholds, nearby AI-intensive areas that reward players for completing top-tier loot and their loadouts.
“So you go into the observatory, and you can get a pretty good idea of where you’re at, but what we’re going to do is, ‘Hey, go explore the rest of the game space,'” Williams said. eggs to do this. There are 77 on the map, but we spawn three at a time.”
While the observatory is the highest point on the map, there are many other high places, including the hull of a wrecked ship near the village of Sawah.
“I think downtown [with Al Mazrah City] And … for this ship, there is a good counterpoint and a good counter [high ground at the Observatory]. So it’s not just one point to dominate all of them,” Williams said. “There are definitely other advantages. …you’re not completely safe there.
While the high ground presents an edge familiar to “Warzone” players, the depth offers a new one. One of the other major enhancements to the “Warzone 2.0” engine is the inclusion of water features, where players can wade or – if the water is deep enough – dive below the surface. The village of Sawah is a partially flooded area, with water sloshing inside buildings and on the streets.
In deeper water, the player can swim and stealthily take out enemies with throwing knives or pistols (although the physics of water affect underwater targets).
But according to O’Hara, water doesn’t just affect a bullet’s speed and trajectory. Characters will appear wet when they come out of the water, and vehicles will slowly sink if the water is too deep and the river has its own current. (Interestingly, the depth of water in Sawah Village allows players to use multiple vehicles to quickly traverse by land or water.)
While the developers did want to show off the new water element, Williams noted that they wanted to find the right balance.
“Sooner or later there will be a circle that may surface,” he said. “But it’s becoming very rare because we don’t want ‘Waterworld,’ where it’s just a bunch of people in the water, staring at each other with pistols.”
The downtown area of the map is sloped into verticality, providing strong positioning for snipers from above, while also allowing for close quarters combat inside buildings.
Another way to get to the top of Al Mazrah’s city skyline is with a nifty new helicopter capable of carrying an entire squad and circling on autopilot while the squad fires at targets below.
“Me and my friends, my colleagues, we do it all the time just because it’s hysterical to see people scatter. [the chopper] Come on,” Williams said, noting that it also presents a tempting target for snipers on the ground. “I’d say it’s about 50-50, and I usually get sniped sooner or later. “
The Terminal, another multiplayer map from the original Modern Warfare 2, is the location of Al Mazrah Airport. Inside, players will find rows of the usual shops and restaurants–including a local branch of Burger Town, a fast-food joint familiar from the Call of Duty franchise–as well as security checkpoints and boarding areas. But the border will extend beyond the terminal’s familiar battlefield.
“It’s the ‘what is space?’ logic again.” Correct? “So with the runway, we want it to be in a place that makes sense geographically, which is why it’s on the coast closer to the ocean,” O’Hara said. “
The entrance is also large enough to support some unconventional play styles.
“I’m the one who likes to drive these vehicles through the airport gates, trying to go up the stairs, and the rest of my team is like ‘We’re going to die!'” O’Hara said.
In addition to the stories that players will craft in the game’s bursts, there will also be a narrative underpinning battle royale and new DMZ modes that are offered between the campaign events of “Warzone 2.0” and “Modern Warfare II” a connected organization.
“What follows is basically the story that follows the campaign, and then also mentions what happened in Al Mazrah, and the story that connects ‘Modern Warfare’ and ‘Warzone’ to some kind of work during the year that’s going to happen big deal,” O’Hara said. “So as the seasons went on, we mixed in the ambient narrative for people who like to explore the map, like ‘What’s this thing here? What does that matter? There will be bigger beats, and there will be more beautiful things to see and play with.”
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