Infinity Ward reveals how South Korean locations, clearer sightlines, and improved traversal mechanics are helping shape the next evolution of Call of Duty Multiplayer.
Call of Duty Season has officially kicked off with Call of Duty: NEXT, along with the first of two beta weekends for Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4, giving us our first hands-on with the newest maps, combat mechanics, and more – chances are by the time you’re reading this I’m playing in the beta right now (here’s how you can join me and start playing today).
As revealed earlier this year, one of the most noteworthy aspects about Modern Warfare 4 is its exciting location in and around North and South Korea. Everything we’ve seen and played has tremendous promise of delivering another rich backdrop to host the next iteration of the series’ renowned Multiplayer mode.
Recently I had a chance to chat with members of the design team – Studio Multiplayer Creative Director Geoff Smith, Technical Designer Jack Hoppus, and Art Director Sergio Gill – on their overarching goal to create something wholly fresh and new for Call of Duty Multiplayer, their new movement and weapon mechanics, and laying the groundwork for a bold South Korean-inspired setting for what’s sounding like an exciting new chapter for the franchise.
A Perfect Setting
For Infinity Ward, the Korean Peninsula offered a compelling backdrop for an all-new Modern Warfare story, with its distinct visual identity, underlying tension, and the growing global influence of Korean culture.
One of the historically cool design aspects of Multiplayer in Call of Duty is how the maps connect to the other modes in the game, like Campaign and Warzone. It’s here where the development team works to keep the game feeling holistic. Early on, two maps that were designed at the start of the project wound up working well as a baseline for the overall artistic design and approach that would come: Silkworm and Lotus. Silkworm, a South Korean city-inspired set, and Lotus on the coast; a more rural set. Those helped to inform photo and scan teams to build out the overall look and feel for the larger Hajin map for Warzone, but also to build a library for the art team to pull from – having environmental storytelling and artwork together to communicate a sense of place without distracting from the competitive play.
“I would say a big emphasis on photorealism is a major pillar for the art team and visual style,” says Gill. “We use photogrammetry to capture photoreal environments as accurately as possible while focusing on distinctive landmarks, and we pick and choose where the environmental storytelling is injected into our maps. We also heavily focus on playtesting, making sure these landmarks don’t negatively impact our maps. I would say that we try to just focus on making sure that those narrative elements that we’re putting in the maps, they enhance the experience without distracting from the competitive play.”
“We always try to come up with a story for each multiplayer map – why are teams there? That helps create this inciting incident and a bit of a MacGuffin. It gives us a sense of purpose,” adds Smith. “In the end, we have to have good clarity of sightlines for players, so it needs to be there, but it can’t impact gameplay negatively. Our studio runs off the mantra that gameplay is king, and so at the end of the day, we’re all kind of beholden to that. But we work really hard to weave in not only the greater narrative from single-player and the world, but also what’s happening in this specific spot.”
In talking more with Smith about how the team establishes an identity on the maps, he tells me that they always aim for variety and to think of the maps as a cast of characters – you don’t want too many of any one type. “We try to make sure that no one map is too swayed one way or another, but if you could just play every map in a row, I think of it as a playlist of an album. It should give you a different experience as you play through each of them.”
K-Pop and PC Bangs
When it came to drawing influence on the Multiplayer maps, the team tells me they first started by looking at all things from modern Korean culture – from entertainment and media like K-pop, PC bangs, and the esports scene to food, dining and fashion for their billboard designs.
“I think the big needle mover for us was the modern stuff – making it feel as current as possible,” adds Smith. “The rooflines and things like that can feel familiar, but having this Korean influence on a modern city really stood out to us, with all the great colors, vending machines, little pops from the billboards, and digital billboards that cycle. We also found this great reference in some coastal towns where they put a massive crab on the crab shacks, and the claws actually move. We were like, ‘That’s really cool. We’ve got to find a way to put that in.’ And we did. It’s those little things we found on our travels.”
One of the ways the team researched and interpreted those influences, while keeping the environments authentic, contemporary, and grounded, was having scan teams go to South Korea and scan the elements they wanted to capture in the game world. “Those walking videos are great because it really gives you a good player perspective from these environments that you’re not able to visit like on a daily basis; they’re very helpful for us as an environmental art team,” says Gill.
“It gives you a nice sense of place,” adds Smith. “Even though we don’t have a lot of civilians walking through our maps, it’s nice to feel how crowds and things work. And sometimes when rain would kick in, that really influenced us to turn on dynamic weather in some of the core maps and see how that feels.”
One of the unique things the team considers when building these inspired locations is tweaking them just enough to their gameplay-adjusted scale. For example, doors and windows and certain objects must be at a certain scale, allowing multiple players to move through these spaces if needed. If you think the doorway entering a convenience store is a little larger than you might see in real life, you’re not wrong.
“We drive art crazy by trying to adjust some of these real-world things into certain scales, and they all throw up in their mouths, like, ‘What are you doing? You’re making these caricatures of things.’ There’s a certain artistic license we need to take with it and keep it feeling like a real place,” says Smith. “A lot of times designers will get inspired and do a rough blockout and they’ll start to get really stuck on that layout, and then it’s hard to get them off that. So we want to have this early phase where art comes in and says, ‘Can you just take the street – the whole street – and just, like, give it a bend?’ And then, of course, the designer thinks that that’s going to ruin their masterpiece, and you have to say, ‘Nope, just let them play a little bit.’ They’ll see that it doesn’t really affect it, and it’s okay.”
Like an Action Hero
The team shares with me that one of the biggest things they wanted to bring to Modern Warfare 4 was addressing the speed of play and wanting to make sure that, even though the game represents this grounded military world, it doesn’t feel frustrating or slow. In the past, the solution would be to add more weight to the character to make you feel grounded – adjusting some of that movement was a key point to address here for Multiplayer in MW4.
Smith tells me that one element to help here was to reduce cover placement throughout the maps. “I know that sounds weird, but by removing cover, we allow the gameplay to become quicker because there are fewer places to check. So, all of those were, in a way, trying to speed up the game without actually speeding up the game. It’s just reducing the cognitive load that you have when you’re moving through a space.”
“We have a bunch of new movement tech and new movement opportunities for players in this game,” adds Hoppus. “You can see it in some of the maps as well. We’ve added a bunch of these pipe climbs that you can use to get on top of these buildings instead of just ladders now. And in some of our maps, you’ll actually find those usable for traversals as well. I find it really enticing because you can see these new movement opportunities, and you can get a chance in our mobility course to test them out as well, but you can also apply them to your rotations in the maps.”
One example provided during our talk was on the map Lithium – there are garage doors designed with a perfect amount of clearance, allowing you to use a supine slide to go underneath and try for a flank route. Having not played the map myself but hearing Hoppus describe it, I can understand how being able to apply these different movement traversal techniques can really change the way I play – even at a baseline level, I know I’ll be able to move through these maps in a more fluid, interactive way.
“We actually ended up retrofitting a bunch of spaces under vehicles, so that you can slide under a vehicle, just to add this cool movie flair to it,” says Hoppus. “The coolest is probably in Silkworm. It’s got a bunch of these cars placed throughout the street, and you can use our new mantle slide. It’s a new movement tech that, if you press the slide button while you’re going onto a mantle, you’ll actually keep your momentum and go into this animation with your gun up. And the cars in Silkworm are a great testing ground to try this out – you feel badass going over these cars with your gun up, still able to fire. It’s one of those moments where, once a player does it the first time, you can hear them go, ‘Oh, no way!’ And you find yourself sliding across the hood like an action hero. It looks pretty sick.”
Get Climbing
When developing these new traversal techniques, I was curious to know how much they impact the overall scale of the environments when building out the wide variety of maps featured in Multiplayer.
“A little bit. Sometimes relevant features and mechanics come in later than right at the beginning, so it’s harder to build the geometry around some of those,” Smith says. “Luckily enough, we’re able to have the maps playing really well. These mechanics are like shortcuts and clever little flanks, so we were able to put these into the maps. And maybe it’s even better that we were able to add them in later because we’ve played them so much we’re like, ‘Oh, I know I want to be able to get to this windowsill. Let me add this little pipe climb.’ So, it just enriched the maps because of these different little features.”
When moving through these maps, there are certain cues needed to inform the player that they can interact with that portion of the environment. As Hoppus mentioned earlier, one of the bigger new movement mechanics is the pipe climb, but how do they make this one more distinct and visually identifiable for players, at an instantaneous read, that this is climbable, not just some random gutter pipe – the solution, as it turns out, was found somewhere very unexpected.
“I was at my son’s soccer game, and I saw there was a church in the background, and they had copper drainpipes,” Smith tells us. “I saw this (copper), and I was like, ‘Maybe the copper would work.’ And so we tried it. Everybody thought I was crazy, but I think with the material read and the way lighting hits it, it looks orange. And they’re like, ‘Well, okay, we have copper pipes now.’
As Hoppus puts it, you can get this “shape language” through the pipes and through some of the spaces that you can slide underneath too – once you see it in one map, like in Kill Block on some of the slabs, you can apply that movement logic to later maps, which opens up an incredible variety of play.
Bringing It All Together
With all the innovations being applied to Modern Warfare 4, like with the new weapon mechanics, I asked the team how that has influenced engagement distance, environmental layout, or placement of tactical opportunities when building out these maps.
“In this game, more so than ever before, I think that a variety of play styles are very viable,” says Hoppus. “Our new movement system, combined with all of our improvements in weapon fidelity, from the removal of bloom to everything down to the sound and the weight of the weapons that you’re holding, means that engagement distances and metrics probably are more important than ever.”
“On the environment – beyond just the readability of players – movement and the way you work with the mechanics heavily impact the way we set dress an interior,” adds Gill. “Or how we have things set dressed around cover– we have things like gun mounts, or how people post up around windowsills. And while we still try to adhere to the realistic aspect, we have to account for the player movement as a big part of our environmental art.”
Making a Call of Duty for Everyone
Call of Duty’s audience is huge. Developing this balance of its well-known playstyle of quick, fast, reactive play, but also acknowledging that some players prefer to play further back in cover, creates a situation where the team is always debating where that line is. How do they balance these new mechanics with the feel and pacing that longtime Modern Warfare multiplayer players expect?
“We don’t want to alienate too many different people, but we’ve been making games for a really long time,” says Smith. “We can’t talk to millions of fans all at the same time, so we trust our instincts as we go. Then we sample test, bring some people in – we’ve made a bunch of changes by bringing in community and different content creators and pro players – and those have been these fine-tuning little touches.”
As I have witnessed firsthand when attending prior Call of Duty events, these players approach the game in ways that I can’t begin to comprehend. Their abilities, as Smith tells me, can break animations and break systems which then allows the team to continue tweaking and correcting the game as needed. “We’ve had some meaningful changes by having those people come in to massage things. We work hard to provide this fluid game but still feeling grounded and have that military vibe that Modern Warfare has always had.”
“But also, for someone who’s just coming back for the first time, someone who’s playing these new maps, someone who’s just getting their hands on our movement – is it intuitive from the first get-go?” says Hoppus. “Are our new mechanics something that players can easily get into? Is it clear where in these spaces other players are going to be coming from, where engagements are going to happen? But then also, if you’re a COD veteran and you’ve been playing every title every year, what’s new, what’s exciting for you? We want it to feel natural, feel intuitive, feel fluid, so that if you want to dedicate time to mastering the movement skills, mastering these different traversals around the maps, that there’s that opportunity for you to grow and learn and have that victory moment.”
From South Korean-inspired streets and photoreal details to cleaner sightlines and new traversal routes, every part of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4’s Multiplayer reflects a balancing act: creating spaces that feel authentic without getting in the player’s way. If Infinity Ward can bring those pieces together, these maps won’t just offer new places to fight – they’ll give Call of Duty players more ways to study, move, and master one of the most compelling and challenging modes in gaming today.
You can get your first taste of these new Multiplayer maps right now during the first of two Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 Beta weekends.
- Weekend One (Modern Warfare 4 Early Access Beta): This begins on August 21 and ends on August 25. The Early Access Beta is available to players who have pre-ordered the game on XBOX Series X|S, PlayStation 5, and PC.
- Weekend Two (Modern Warfare 4 Open Beta): The second Beta weekend is open to all players on all platforms, including Nintendo Switch 2, regardless of their pre-order status. The second Modern Warfare 4 Beta weekend is scheduled to begin on August 28 and end on September 1.
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 launches October 23, 2026, for XBOX Series X|S, PlayStation 5, PC, and Nintendo Switch 2.