Infinity Ward: No More Call of Duty 4 DLC

Infinity Ward has responded to forum users over on Xbox.com when asked why there has not been any information, let alone the release of some of the promised playlists for Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare. Apparently this because Infinity Ward is hard a work on the next installment in the series, plus I guess they figure gamers have enough to do with Call of Duty: World at War burning up the charts.

Thanks to Adam over at The Gamer Limit who has kindly posted the discussion from the Xbox. com forums which started when a member was asking where the promised content was:

“Glad to hear you enjoyed CoD:WaW. As for DLC for our games, we did three map packs for Call of Duty 2, ending with an impressive number altogether. For Call of Duty 4, we focused on including as many maps as we could out of box, and had 16 from DAY 1 (adding four more later for a total 20 Maps total).

Personally, I prefer to give the community as much as possible out of the box instead of making them wait and pay extra for them later. However, whenever possible (like with COD2) we continue to make maps if our development process allows for it.

It’s a bit of a catch 22 in gaming. Of course as a gamer you always want more, more more. If you include them out of box (shipped with game for no extra cost) then it’s just ignored and people demand more. If you instead, decide to get the game out and then worry about beefing up the map selection via DLC, people say “don’t nickle and dime me” or “this should have been included in the shipped game”.

Perfect solution, ship with a load of maps (like we did) and also release a lot of DLC (for free). In a perfect world, that would be fantastic. Regretfully in a realistic development environment, it’s near impossible. Unless your Criterion of course, with their magical DLC fairies ; )

In all seriousness though, I hear ya, and We’re always working on improving our development process and planning to ensure that we can deliver more and more community support in the form of updates / DLC and other forms of support for our future games. We have big plans for our future (still currently unofficial) projects.”

The discussion continues after the jump.

When asked about the promised playlists, here was the reply:

“Regretfully the playlists never came to fruition, however that’s hardly a accurate depiction of the validity of community support. Community support goes so much deeper than just “playlist updates”. Good community support goes unnoticed, and unpraised, because it is done in a way to ensure that the shipped product includes the requests, features, and demands of the community out of box.

Community Support via the COD2 community helped shape and mold COD4 into the game it is, and community support via COD4 will help shape future Infinity Ward titles to ensure we’re always improving and including community wants and needs into future games.

Every level designer / texture artist / enviornmental artist / etc. working on a new map for a previous game is one less working on a map for a future game. Again going back to the, do you attempt to include as much as possible out of box for the people spending $60 and that goes to everyone, or do you focus on doing endless DLC for previous game, shipping with only a few maps, and beefing up MP via DLC after launch for a fee (which only a % of community people can enjoy due to internet connection / Xbox Live gold requirement). Regretfully that’s the harsh reality and shitty part of game development.

Since COD4 however, we’ve been focusing on expanding our team here at Infinity Ward and looking at our development cycle to see how it can be optimized and improved to make strides in how we can have the best of both worlds. A polished / stacked game at launch and a dedicated team for DLC post-launch while everyone else looks towards the future.”

At least gamers can take heart in the fact that they are hard at work on the next title.