One of Call of Duty: Warzone’s most criticised aspects is how developer Infinity Ward continues to rotate the list of available modes on a weekly basis. Though that keeps things interesting, players are often disappointed when they find that their favourite mode is gone. This is a conscious decision on the part of Infinity Ward, but the developer is working on more elaborate stories for Warzone. Speaking to Gamesbeat, narrative director Taylor Kurosaki talked a little bit about his team’s role in evolving the game’s narrative away from the standard campaign. Kurosaki said that the Modern Warfare story never stopped with the end of the campaign, adding that events in Spec Ops and now Warzone all further that narrative. “The important way to look at it is, when we set out to make the game way back at the end of 2016, a big tenet for us was–I’m going to parrot this back, because it’s been drilled into my head so much. It’s consistency and continuity across all modes,” said Kurosaki. “We didn’t want it to feel like three separate games in one box. We wanted it to feel like one massive world with a universal fiction, a universal narrative. For players that love story, we want you to get more story when you’re playing Warzone, when you’re playing multiplayer, or when you’re playing Spec Ops. “If you go back and watch the season one intro movie, that’s telling a bit of the story. Then you watch the season two intro movie, the one where Ghost made his appearance. That’s telling a bit more of the story. Now with season three’s intro, it’s continuing that narrative thread.”
Kurosaki confirmed that it’s all leading up to something, but the developer isn’t sure how long it’ll take to get there. The narrative lead also addressed the return of Alex, a decision some criticised for cheapening his sacrifice in the story. “The important thing for Alex, when he made that choice to fight for something he believed in, when he made that choice to be willing to–rather than being ordered to complete a mission, but to be able to choose the mission that was important to him, it wasn’t, for us, about him actually dying,” he explained. “It was about being willing to make the choice, to be willing to sacrifice himself. That still holds.” As for the future, Kurosaki was specifically asked whether Infinity Ward plans any sweeping changes to Warzone in a similar way to what Epic Games has been doing with Fortnite. “That’s exactly the kind of thing that we’re working on, that we have planned,” revealed Kurosaki. “Again, it’s all going to fit into this macro that we’ve established in Modern Warfare, and that we’ve continued into Warzone. If you know who the players are in Modern Warfare, it’ll all make sense, and it’ll all feel appropriate to the universe.” Kurosaki didn’t go into specifics, so it’s not really clear how big these changes and events are going to be. Fortnite, for instance, updates its battle royale map several times within each season, and usually caps them off with massive live events. By comparison, Warzone’s updates have been limited to loot refreshes and the arrival of new variants of existing modes. While interesting in their own right, they’re nowhere near on Fortnite’s level.
