Infinity Ward's Robert Bowling on the biggest game of the year.
by Martin Robinson, IGN UK
UK, October 20, 2009 - Robert Bowling – or FourDotZero if you're one of the 60,000 plus who follow him on his Twitter account – is the public face of Infinity Ward, a man whose every utterance about the developer's latest game has been turned into news by an audience rabid for Modern Warfare 2. Despite being at the wearier end of a European press tour, and despite us repeatedly calling the game Call of Duty, he's an amiable host, still visibly excited by the game as he runs us through all the new features. Here he takes us through some of the history of 2009's hottest game, as well as some insight on what it is that makes Infinity Ward one of the most talked about developers in the industry.
IGN: Going back to the first Modern Warfare – we understand now that there were fears that taking the Call of Duty series away from the traditional WW2 setting raised some fears at Activtision. Was Infinity Ward also worried, or did you expect it to be so successful?
Robert Bowling: There were no worries on the development side – Modern Warfare was always something we wanted to do, because it gave us a clean creative slate to create our own characters, our own conflict and it was the first time we really ever got the chance to do that, so were more excited than anything else to put it out there. I don't think anyone expected it to ever get to the degree that it got too – it became this juggernaut of an online multiplayer game, and we've got 14 million players still online, and I don't think anyone ever expected that.
Robert Bowling: When we finished Call of Duty 4 we wondered what our next game was going to be – do we do a completely new game, do we do a sequel and if we do a sequel do we build from this one or do we completely reinvent the wheel? So there were a lot of questions we had, and it wasn't always obvious to do a sequel but we'd built up this story and we thought we really wanted to continue it. We decided that we wanted to do a sequel and we wanted to add a bunch of new stuff, but keep the stuff we loved. It's not just adding new weapons and levels, it is changing features, changing the way you play the game and experience the game.
IGN: Modern Warfare is something that Infinity Ward has ownership over now – does that mean that the team is tied into dong any further instalments in the series?
Robert Bowling: Not really. Right now we don't have a clue what our next game is going to be, and we won't know what it will be until we finish with Modern Warfare 2, which won't be for a while – once this game comes out we're going to take a little break, we're going to play with the community to see what people like and what they want more of so we can focus on the DLC for this game, and once all that's wrapped up and done then we'll start thinking about what's coming next. Right now, if we want to make another one then we might, but we've really no clue what our next game is.
Much of the single-player is still under wraps, and will remain so until the day of release.
IGN: What is it about the core Call of Duty experience that differentiates it from all of the other first-person shooters, and how did you up the ante in the second one.
Robert Bowling: We approached this game as being like a new IP – we didn't approach it as doing a sequel, we focused on making the game fun. We took inspiration from all sorts, from film in the way we told the story and then from other genres in how we did multiplayer, so we played RPGs and we bought in elements of those, we played racing games and we bought in elements of those, we really focused on pushing it towards being a first person action game as opposed to a first person shooter, because you can do so much more in the game in every mode than just being a shooter. You can play defensively, you can run and gun or you can jump into Spec-ops and just do snow-mobile races. There's so much you can do.
IGN: What do you think it is about Modern Warfare that's made it catch on with the mainstream?
Robert Bowling: I think that what makes the Modern Warfare series so addictive and so popular and seeping into pop culture is that it's really accessible to new players, even if you're not a fan of first person shooters you can get in there, get XP, unlock stuff and have a lot of fun and feel like you're doing really well, but there's a lot of tiers of depth to it for the hardcore who really want to master it, and feel like they're the best player ever. There's elements to it that appeal to every type of game player, and that's just in multiplayer. Now we have single player for one type of player, co-op for someone who's intimidated by multiplayer, they can just sit on a couch with a friend and have similar experiences with just their buddies.
The new setting is familiar but different - these are slums, but more colourful ones.
IGN: Call of Duty started as a PC-led franchise but that's changed with Modern Warfare. Do you think Modern Warfare is more in tune with console sensibilities than Call of Duty used to be?
Robert Bowling: We definitely like for the game to be equal on every platform, but the console games became so popular that the majority of our audience are on console. So when we're going out to our community to get feedback, the majority of feedback we're getting is from the console userbase. We'd definitely like it to be a unified user base, and with Modern Warfare 2, more than any previous games, each platform is very similar to each other in how they perform.
IGN: Do you feel flattered by all the games running away from Modern Warfare 2 in the run-up to Christmas?
Robert Bowling: Yeah, but who knows what reason they decided to move into 2010? It's exciting for us, because we're coming out and we don't have to worry about taking time away from our game to play everyone else's game, we can just get online and play with our community over and over again. And some Uncharted 2.
IGN: With Modern Warfare 1, there were some criticisms – for example, the single players often chided for being too short. Did you feel you had to cater to those criticisms, or did you want to carry on doing things your own way?
Robert Bowling: Not at all, we try and focus on the experience we're trying to deliver, and that experience is a very cinematic story, and we really let the story dictate how long the game is. We never go into development saying 'We're going to make a twenty hour game because people want a twenty hour game' – we want to deliver an intense experience where you walk away and go 'wow, I want to play more'. It's okay for you to want to play more of something – that's a good thing. And then you've got all these other modes. You might love the story, it left you wanting more but that's great but jump into the multiplayer and 14 million people have been playing it for two years straight. That's a long game, no matter how you look at it.
IGN: Have you had Hollywood knocking on your door about a movie adaptation?
Robert Bowling: We meet with a lot of directors and writers and people in the movie industry all the time because our industries are very similar to each other and our crafts are very similar to each other, so we always like to see how they do things and we do things – but as far as a film is concerned, we're all just talking, we're all just friends.
Modern Warfare 2 promises to be more than just new guns and new levels.
IGN: There are loads of pretenders to Modern Warfare's throne – what is it about Infinity Ward's games that make them so successful?
Robert Bowling: I think it's the team – the core team that began the Call of Duty franchise has been there ever since. People think we grow by leaps and bounds every year, but it's not true – the core guys who are amazing are the driving force behind the games, and since we're such a close-knit team we have fast iteration we're all together and we don't let any bullshit pass. We have a quality bar and if it's not above that we let everyone know and it gets cut. It has to be 60fps, it has be this and that, and as long as you don't waver from that, not for marketing or whatever – don't focus on the buzz features just focus on the thing that you're trying to craft – and that sets the game apart from all the other games.
Modern Warfare 2 comes out on November 10 – in case you have not gotten yours yet, click here to pre-order to get it the day its release!
