Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare Studio Head on Rebuilding Infinity Ward

For a studio behind some of the biggest games of the last decade, there has been a great amount of uncertainty surrounding Infinity Ward. Between the contentious departures in 2010 of studio heads Jason West and Vince Zampella (who went on to found Titanfall developer Respawn), the middling response to Call of Duty: Ghosts, and the merger with Neversoft, Infinity Ward had seemingly lost its place as the preeminent CoD developer that Modern Warfare established it as.

This year's Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare looks to change that. It places more of an emphasis than ever before on a character-driven narrative--one that has you playing as the guy in charge, not just another soldier. And while he characterizes it as merely a "friendly competition" with fellow CoD developers, studio head Dave Stohl says Infinity Ward absolutely wants to prove itself with its latest offering.

We recently sat down with Stohl to talk about the injection of new blood the studio has seen, the departure the campaign makes from that of previous games, and the decision to head to space. You can check it out below, and check back soon for more of our interviews with the staff at Infinity Ward.

GameSpot: How long have you been at Infinity Ward?

Dave Stohl: I've been at Infinity Ward about three years.

So it was right after Ghosts you're brought on for this project?

Well, it has been about two and a half years. I came on in the spring, right after Ghosts.

Can you talk about those early days, brainstorming and kind of just mapping out what you wanted to do next?

When I came over--and I worked with the studio and Neversoft, and at the time I kind of managed all the studios of Activision. I used to work at Treyarch--I'd been at Treyarch for years. I came over to work with this crew and there was definitely a lot of discussions going on, kind of testing the limits of what Call of Duty [games] are. What is it as a brand and what could it be, and things like that.

The people who work in the studio are game developers, but they're gamers, and so just like anyone, there's a desire to do cool new, different stuff. I think there was a lot of that going on: What could we do? What is Call of Duty? A lot of discussions around that, and that's what was going on when I came over.

Why the decision to go to space? Was that just the natural progression of the series, after Advanced Warfare, Black Ops III started pushing that way? Or was space really this setting you wanted to explore and facilitate some of the things you wanted to do?

I think it's more about what lets you do cool new stuff. I think that, in the beginning, there was a lot of prototyping going on around different ideas and concepts. We had this prototype we did that was really about that kind of transition moment. If you think about in the game now [and] the beginning, the first time you take off from Geneva, that launch sequence and that transition up to that first big space battle. That was kind of the essence of that cool idea: The idea you could transition from something so familiar, like a storm-the-hill, charge-the-hill moment--a very Modern Warfare-feel-y moment through this cinematic transition up and then into something that was totally new and different. I think also the idea of this kind of seamless game, storytelling in a different way, having a hub that moved with you through the game [and] had a life of its own was almost a character. Those were ideas that people wanted to pursue.

It was more about those gameplay ideas and mechanics than it was necessarily just about space. It was about, what is going to allow us--this crew, this team--to do a bunch of new, cool stuff that they want to do in the game? And then it evolved from there.

When you said when you came on two and a half years ago, is there anything that the studio learned from Ghost that they wanted to either implement or avoid or kind of morph in Infinite Warfare?

I think there's a couple of things. It's not just this studio and Ghost; I think we've all been in the franchise in different roles or in different projects for a long, long time. It's really an accumulation of things that you've done over these years, and then you test these things you want to do differently.

There was a strong feeling about wanting to lead the troops rather than be led.

I think one of the things that came out of Ghost and some CoD games we've built over the past, was this idea of playing a strong leadership role rather than being one of the junior guys in the crew. One of the themes that came on really strong was, how would we make it so that you really felt like you were the leader rather than the guy with the cool guys, with the dudes who were doing the cool stuff. That idea of being the captain again; this is another piece that people really wanted to do that kind of contributed to the end result of going to space and being the captain of the ship and all that kind of stuff.

There was a strong feeling about wanting to lead the troops rather than be led. And there was this idea they wanted to kind of explore new territory and also bring some new mechanics like the dogfights and stuff. That's certainly something from Ghosts, but you could say that's also from a more than a decade of experience in this franchise as well.

As far as the team you were talking about, you said there was a lot of different cultures of playing it. You've all worked on a lot of different titles; you have people from Naughty Dog, people that were from Neversoft, you've been here since Modern Warfare. Can you talk about how you went about looking around and seeing who you could bring onto the team, and how you could use everybody's experience to kinda make like an Infinite Warfare itself? With Taylor [Kurosaki] and Jake [Minkoff] coming from Naughty Dog, can you talk about how you recruited all these people?

Absolutely. More than the logistics of the recruiting, one of those things when you talk about that we wanted to do better--that we always want to do better but we were in the moment thinking about--was narrative character development and storytelling; I think that's something in every game or franchise that I've worked on over the years, I feel like, we always strive to do better and I think the industry … certainly Naughty Dog is very good at it, Taylor and Jacob worked on games that do that really well. That was something that we really wanted to bring into this game.

We always want to do it better in the Call of Duty franchise, but in this game in particular, now that you've seen it, its story, narrative, and characters are a big part of it. We wanted to tell a story that wasn't super complex that was more about characters developing, rather than the complexity of the story. That was something that we were really interested in raising the bar on, and when I met those guys, it was an obvious fit. They had a lot of experience that we didn't necessarily have. I thought that was how that came about, that desire to do an actual, more narrative-focused Call of Duty.

There are veterans here but for all intents and purposes, a large part of this team is new to the series, as far as working on a Call of Duty. Can you talk about how the Infinity Ward name is the same, but it's almost like the faces themselves are different?

Obviously there are ... You're right. There's a lot of people who have been here a long time; there's a ton of people that are new to the franchise. Which is not a new thing for me because, like I said, I ran Treyarch for years and we got into Call of Duty fresh and new then and brought a lot of new guys' thinking into it then. I think that here, while there's definitely still some veterans but a lot of guys who are coming in more recent of the franchise, I don't actually think that's a bad thing. I think it's kind of an interesting thing. Guys like Brian Horton, Taylor, Jacob--guys who are new to this, that come from games like Last of Us, Uncharted, Tomb Raider, or whatever--they bring a different kind of appreciation for not just the game itself, but the process of making the game.

It's kind of an interesting mixture hiring these new people, but you're not hiring them onto a game that they don't know anything about. You're hiring them onto a game that they're really opinionated about.

People that came here from DICE or from movies, wherever they came from, they come from all over. I think that people bring something, and I think that's nice. They also bring the fact that they've been a CoD player into the studios, so they had their perspective on what they think CoD does well or doesn't, or what they liked in this game or that game. That's always really interesting too. When you're working on a game as big as Call of Duty, everybody ... mostly they play the game, so they bring their own kind of desires and prejudices to the team when they join. It's kind of an interesting mixture hiring these new people, but you're not hiring them onto a game that they don't know anything about. You're hiring them onto a game that they're really opinionated about. That's just a funny thing; they're already passionate about the content before they come on, which is usually why they want to come and work on it. They're like, "Holy cow, I want to work on Call of Duty; I've been a fan for years." You hear that over and over.

You're getting people from all over--that definitely shapes the studio, shapes the product. It certainty shaped this product when you think about the structure of the game versus the things we wanted to change: the structure, the campaign, side missions with continuity, the hub, the narrative focus, and all that. I kind of forget your original question.

I was curious, it's almost like this team has existed, almost like its first game...

In a way it is. Neversoft and Infinity Ward, and even Raven in Wisconsin. These are all guys that have worked together in ways. Kind of coming together, we did in essence form up as a new studio, in the beginning of this project--which is hard, it is. That was a challenge, but at the same time, it's kind of nice to bring some new juice into the mix when guys like me have been around since the beginning. Sometimes you get stuck in your own way of doing things, and so I think new talent is always good.

You bring up the beginning; Infinity Ward started Call of Duty in 2003, then obviously Modern Warfare was a big stepping stone as far as evolving it, modernizing it. Now there are three studios and you work at Treyarch and obviously Sledgehammer is doing its thing now. Is there any internal philosophy around here that maybe Infinity Ward kind of wants to get back in the spotlight with the Call of Duty series with Infinite Warfare?

Every studio wants every Call of Duty game to be a cool new, big, kind of definitive Call of Duty game. That's no different than any other studio. I think that the studio has its history, Treyarch has now built its history with Black Ops, which is cool. Sledge is doing the same thing, and they're trying to define their studio by the games that they make, and they wanna impress everybody, which is totally natural.

We're at an interesting place right now because there are three studios that are very talented studios, with a bunch of experienced developers. There's certainly a lot of friendly competition, but we are at the point now where the challenge is so big and the games are so big that we have to kind of work together more now than what we have in the past. Where there are guys like me, you know I worked with the Sledge guys when we got Sledge up and running; I was at Treyarch and Mark Lamia, who runs Treyarch, and I have worked together for 21 years.

There's a certain amount of continuity now that also helps when we need to kind of pitch in with each other to get something done, which breaks a little bit of that down. But still, we want that kind of fun and healthy competition going on between the studios for sure. Does this crew want to prove themselves and say,"Wow, check this out, it's totally awesome!" Yeah, absolutely. Every studio should. That's why we all groove off doing this job. It's not anything out of the normal; it's not like, because this studio's been there from the beginning … I think everybody wants to say "Hey, look, I'm the shiny, cool new thing."

To go back to the campaign quick, it seems like campaign is the biggest departure. I played a lot of multiplayer in the beta, at the XP event. I've played Zombies; obviously, Zombies always has a really distinct flavor each time around. It seems like the campaign is where the biggest changes are being made as far as the Call of Duty formula goes. It's more focused on an intimate, kind of characterized storyline, and then it's open-ended in terms of gameplay. Can you talk about the decisions to really tackle that aspect of Call of Duty, which is usually a three-prong kind of a game.

I think when we talked about how some of us have been around the franchise for a long time and some of us are new, those are the growing pains of doing something different. So the campaign structure is like, we've focused on making these cool levels with tight narrative, and these kind of interstitial cutscenes and stuff like that. Treyarch did some cool stuff with co-op in Black Ops III, so there's been some changes to the structure. We really wanted to integrate the character stuff deeply into the game, and that required doing things differently.

It required that some of us old-timers break ourselves out of the normal way of doing things, which is hard.

Even when I talked about leadership: Okay we want you to make choice, and we reinforced that with side missions. Not just choice that the character makes or that the characters in the lead, but with you as the player we wanted to ... side missions are really important to us; making them optional is really important to us. We wanted to motivate you to do them, and have you choose to do them rather than just force them into the linear flow. I think that was a good idea. It reinforces that thing we're trying to get you to feel in the game, which is, "I'm the leader; I can make the choice," and that kind of stuff.

It required that some of us old-timers break ourselves out of the normal way of doing things, which is hard. That was as hard as merging--having a bunch of new people come together to build kind of a new studio. The end result I think was worth it, but it was like, okay, we know we're actually going to reinforce these characters and have these moments in a level, rather than in between levels. And we're going to think about this arc of character development and how that changes over the course of the game more than we've thought about it in the past. It required us actually building levels differently, and building structure differently. It's hard, but it's cool, I think.

I think that's all the specific questions I had. Do you want to add anything?

I'm really stoked about how the game came together, and I'm really excited about the game. I'm also proud of the fact that this kind of melting pot of developers that is this kind of new IW is really gelled now as a team. It's like you go through … you're galvanized a little bit by the horrors of finishing a game, and I think we've come out the other side as a really great studio with a lot of new talent. I would call our studio a strong narrative studio, which I wouldn't have said necessarily, in the past. It's a good thing for Call of Duty; it's a good thing for the studio. I think we've raised the bar in a lot of ways and I'm really excited about not just the game but the studio going forward. Pretty stoked.