Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 w/Devs - Campaign, Multiplayer, DMZ, and More | Official XBOX Podcast

Jack Mark (0:00)

Games in this podcast range from E to M.

SPEAKER_2 (0:03)

Hey, everyone. Welcome to The Official XBOX Podcast, the only podcast coming to you from inside XBOX. I'm here today at Infinity Ward to cover all things Modern Warfare 4 You excited for campaign? Getting sweaty in multiplayer? How about the new DMZ mode? We're covering everything. All right, Ghost, let's roll out.

Jack Mark, welcome. Thank you so much for being here.

Jack Mark (0:29)

Thanks for having us.

SPEAKER_3 (0:30)

Welcome to the ward room.

SPEAKER_2 (0:31)

Honestly, thank you for having me here. This is such a cool room too. We got Ghost back there just like watching us, you know?

Jack Mark (0:39)

For sure.

SPEAKER_4 (0:39)

He's always watching.

SPEAKER_2 (0:41)

Let's start with Infinity Ward itself. The studio has been making Call of Duty games for-

SPEAKER_4 (0:47)

Since the beginning.

SPEAKER_2 (0:48)

Since the beginning, centuries. What do you think defines an Infinity Ward Call of Duty game?

Jack Mark (0:55)

The people that make it, that's where it helps define it.

SPEAKER_4 (0:57)

That's a good one.

SPEAKER_2 (0:58)

That was really good. I got chills.

Jack Mark (1:00)

I mean, for us, we spend a lot of time paying attention to the small details. We spend a lot of time trying to be as authentic as possible to the subject matter for the launch of the game. So we've done a lot of research on like Korea, the military in Korea. We want to make sure that all of that comes to in the games we're making.

SPEAKER_4 (1:19)

And then just the energy, just keeping the energy at a high level so everyone feels that same vision that we're going for. The overall vibes. Vibes need to be high.

SPEAKER_2 (1:27)

Vibes definitely need to be high, yeah.

With Modern Warfare 4, stepping in to the shoes of Private Park. The opening mission has us in South Korea. It looks beautiful. And we actually get a moment to kind of like see the city at the peak of normalcy, which was really interesting. But I would love to know how you landed on focusing Modern Warfare 4 on the Korean Peninsula for the majority of the game. Also, what were some authentically Korean elements you really wanted to capture?

Jack Mark (1:55)

Well, we started setting off to make this game. We knew we wanted to go to a fresh setting. We wanted to go somewhere where we hadn't been before in order to kind of reinvigorate a little bit Modern Warfare and go somewhere different. So then we started talking about Asia, and then we started trying to hone in on where exactly. And then really we started dialing in on the fact that, you know, we're in what's called a Hallyu wave. That's the spread of Korean culture throughout the world. It started in the 90s with K-dramas making their way into Hong Kong and Shanghai and places like that.

And now we all eat Korean food, we watch Korean movies, we watch K-dramas. We have a lot of Koreans that work here, you know, across the company in various different jobs. And so we have a Slack channel that we call Korean Culture, where people can go in who are not Korean and say, hey, I'm making this thing. How do I make this authentic? And I was just looking in there and there's two people having conversation because at IW, we always like to have when the juggernaut is there, he's playing death metal in his ears. And so we're like, well, now we're going to make some Korean death metal. And so there's two people having a conversation there about what the lyrics of the death metal songs should be in Korean, right? You know, looking through this, people discussing like are these snacks authentic? Does this sign on the wall look authentic?

And then we started to dial in on the fact that we're always looking to make our games feel like they're ripped from the headlines, which means not copied because you don't want to feel tried, but you want it to feel like it could happen in our world, in the world that we live in today. So Korea, I remember coming across a picture from, I think it was CNN, that showed all the artillery batteries in North Korea on the border that are within range of Seoul. And it's kind of crazy because when we talk to South Koreans, they don't really think about it that much. You know what I mean? It's this thing that's in the background, seems unlikely, yet every able-bodied male is conscripted, they serve in the military, and those military units are often cooperating with US troops because there's such a huge US troop presence there. So all these things just kind of made it perfect for us, for Modern Warfare.