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Call Of Duty: Warzone

Black Ops 6

Company

Activision/Raven Software

Duration

1 year

Role

Associate Systems Designer

Duration

August 2024 - August 2025

After my shipping Call of Duty Warzone during the Modern Warfare 3 era under Infinity Ward, I made the transition to Call of Duty Warzone Black Ops 6 as the design owner of our meta progression system, where I was responsible for designing and managing the entire meta progression system for Warzone!

I interfaced with over 40 people across 3 studios.

I worked fully remote during this time.

I designed and implemented over 1000 challenges.

During this time I left the 2nd highest amount of internal playtest feedback (~230 by the end of the title)!

I designed over 4 seasonal events, which had total player participation numbers of over 2,000,000 per event!

If you want to hear the full story - read on!

Transitioning

Where I began work on something new

Design Alignment With A New Studio

One of the biggest transitions when shifting from different Warzone titles is building a rapport with new partners. Treyarch leads the Black Ops franchise, and our meta progression in Warzone was tightly coupled with Multiplayer, and Zombies! 


I prioritized developing alignment with Treyarch's challenge designers early by connecting with them and establishing design best practices alongside them. This involved things such as:

  • Standardizing how we formatted our challenge descriptions

  • Establishing benchmarks for our shared types of challenges (time to complete, thematics, difficulty etc.)

  • Setting up a regular cadence of meeting syncs

  • Developing a cross-studio challenge Creative Content Review process

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I also made sure we spent time understanding a bit about each other as people, and not just contributors. We were going to be working together for 2 years, and building foundations of trust and mutual respect were key to building great content together!

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Moving to Black Ops 6 was a big transition, but approaching it with a team-first mindset made it smooth!

Responsibilities

Where I owned my work

Owning Warzone's Meta Progression

One big change from my work on Modern Warfare 3 was that I was given the responsibility to own all of Warzone's Meta Progression design (which included over 1000 challenges). This was previously the responsibility of one of our Senior Expert designers, who transitioned to lead a startup! This shift in responsibility was big. I had a number of systems I was responsible on leading the design for:

  • Daily challenges (a daily rolled system for earning bonus experience)

  • Calling Card challenges (unlocking account cosmetics through themed requirements)

  • Weapon Camo challenges (unlocking cosmetics for guns through gun use)

  • Seasonal Event challenges (unlocking key cosmetics for limited time modes)

  • Armory challenges (unlocking legacy weapons from previous titles)

  • Our core player progression (called 1-55 progression, which unlocked weapons, equipment, and more)

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​The responsibility for leading the design and implementation of these systems included:

  • Aligning challenge designs to be in parity with their premium studio counterparts

  • Building the challenges using proprietary tooling

  • Writing and managing documentation for all designed and implemented content

  • Coordinating with engineering to build scripting required for content rolled out across BO6's lifecycle

  • Investigating live issues with challenges to resolve them quickly

  • Working with a distributed data science team to develop analytics dashboards covering challenge performance

  • Driving and facilitating content reviews with designer and directors across Raven, Treyarch, and studios on contract

Pivoting with the Introduction of PvPvE

One major change that had profound impacts on meta progression was the introduction of Warzone's Casual mode, where players could play Battle Royale with 150 players, where 130 of those players were actually "bots" and only 20 were real players.

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Having a multiplayer mode with easier NPC enemies has never existed in the CoD ecosystem outside of the singleplayer campaign and strictly PvE modes such as coop play.

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This mode was released during our fourth season, while we had already designed and implemented a number of challenges with benchmarks that were in lockstep with our partners at Treyarch. This new PvPvE mode was wildly successful, and it was clear I would need to alter future challenge offerings to accommodate this mode.

After strategizing with my Creative team, we settled on:

  • Allowing challenge completions in this new mode

  • Featuring exclusive Casual challenges on its release in our Daily Challenge pool

  • Increasing challenge benchmarks for Warzone to maintain parity with premium CoD

Being A Playtest Champion

At Raven, production runs daily playtests for many of the game modes that are actively being developed. The playtests are as opportunities for a number of things:

  • Finding and reporting bugs with various pieces of content

  • Getting design insights on various elements of gameplay (pacing, power dynamics, balance etc.)

  • Building team morale

  • Creating connections between peers

  • Starting higher level creative conversations about whether the game is tracking towards its goals

  • Allowing the developers to have fun with the thing they're making​​

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As one of the playtesters and designers, I took this opportunity and responsibility seriously. I represented design by engaging with the playtest process both in the game and out of the game:

  • My attendance record per week was averaging 4.5 times per week.

  • I made sure to not only leave my own feedback (almost every playtest), but engage with the feedback of others

  • Contributed to the design of a Playtest Group Finder Web Tool that allowed our peers to easily "squad up"

  • Brought key feedback to design stakeholders to prevent feedback from being lost

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A view from the game in the Verdansk map. One of the favorite returning maps for the studio as a whole!

Being A Live Firefighter

One of my key responsibilities on top of designing new content for the future was managing live bugs in the meta progression domain. This often meant being the first point of contact on any challenge or meta progression bug players or the team might report seeing while the game was running live.

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Specifically - this meant that I had to:

  • Investigate the cause of the bug by looking through its setup in tooling or diagnostic tools for the live game

  • Work with our QA team to rapidly reproduce the bug

  • Include engineering or feature designers to coordinate on a fix if the issue was rooted in gameplay systems

  • Examine telemetry and analytics to determine if a bug is an isolated case

  • Fix the bug rapidly and work with community managers to provide an outward facing response

  • Ensure players who were impacted by the bug were given "fixups" by our online engineering team

  • Analyze causes of bugs (data entry issue, pipeline issues etc.) and take corrective action to prevent them in the future

Reflection

Where I look back on my experience

Lessons Learned

This title represented a major shift in Raven's expectations for my involvement in Warzone's meta design. I was the definitive subject matter expert on Warzone's meta progression during Black Ops 6 - which was intimidating but served as a catalyst for my development as a design contributor and design leader. 

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Serving as the design owner for meta progression during the year of Black Ops 6 taught me a number of key lessons:

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  • Being a good partner is sometimes better than getting exactly what I want. There were often times where, during a review, I made changes to our challenge criteria to follow feedback from one of our partner studio directors. This built a good rapport and if done strategically, did not negatively impact our game. Later I could use the "good will" that was built up to request bigger changes to drive impactful changes I believed in.

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  • Documentation clarity is critical for live service maintenance. Diligently maintaining massive lists of challenge and meta data tunings served me exceptionally well during Black Ops 6. Not only did it make content reviews exceptionally fast and painless, but it also sped up any necessary investigations during critical live bugs. Taking the extra time to document things clearly pays dividents multiple times over!

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