I love a good story. It’s probably why I love history, history is just a story of our shared learnings, failings and relationships over time. So let me tell you a story about the year 2021 and how an idea born out of frustration became one of the most popular modes in Call of Duty Warzone.
Recently, I was interviewing someone for an open position as a senior designer at Raven Software, someone I not only already knew but who had over the last two years often was apart of the multi-disciplinary interview panel we would organize as part of our interview process. So they knew all my usual questions as well as some of my lesser known questions I often deployed to get a sense of who the person I was interviewing really was. And they decided to use one of those questions against me. “What are you most proud of having created in your career?”, something I often asked but hadn’t answer myself. On the spot, I said Iron Trials ‘84 back in 2021, and I recounted that story to the room for some people who knew that story and for others who had joined the company after that time and had never heard the story. Later that day, Joe Romano, one of the people in that interview as well as one of the people pivotal to that story said “not many people know that lore so that makes me happy to hear you tell the story again”.
Back in 2021, we were coming up on over a year of live support for Warzone, something that we had not really fully embraced yet as a studio since, traditionally, we had been doing support for Call of Duty Campaign which gave us much longer cycles to get work done. In this faster pace environment, we were being ground down with live ops work, shipping every other month and essentially needing to port the current CoD title’s content into Warzone, something made even more difficult since we were on different engines.
Around the beginning of July 2021, we saw there was a gap in the schedule in terms of upcoming Season’s playlists, so we took a bit of a gamble. Over the last two months, we had been given a mandate to make “Small Limited Time Modes” that were low cost, and something we could quickly spin into live and see what players liked and what might stick since the previous season, we released a mode called Payload that took over half a year of development but saw limited success in terms of player sentiment and time players spent in mode.
Under the guise of Small LTMs, Sven Zobler, Joe Romano and I began working on a mode we called Double Down. The idea was to make something more competitive in Warzone; one month prior we had our first ever World Series of Warzone, which we were hoping to parlay into some kind of Ranked mode in Warzone. Originally we had gotten pushback since Ranked was something exclusively for Multiplayer, and that was seen as untouchable for Warzone, but then again, the same thing had been said about resurgence mechanics in Warzone (since that was core to MP), but Beenox had done that with the Rebirth the previous year, which eventually became a staple, so we decided to take the route of asking for forgiveness instead of permission.
The idea of Double Down was instead of lowering time to kill, we raised it. The logic was most people pursuing meta builds were always aiming to lower TTK, so raising that by more the doubling health would allow for the more competitive players to leverage their skill gap, leaving less to chance and more to skill.
Along with the regular seasonal blog post, Sven and Joe also put together an intel drop with all the particulars for the mode, one since we were making some radical departures from previous LTMs, but also as a way to be more transparent to the community of the particular changes, something that we at Raven at the time were leaning more into with our community so that they were aware of what we were doing. Needless to say, I think they liked it
Based off of the reaction the mode got, within a month we had the greenlight to begin developing another variant of Iron Trials for the following spring (Caldera Iron Trials) to confirm some of our assumptions, which was followed by the start of development of Ranked Play in Warzone which we released the following year.
Mike Parilla 