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The Call of Duty blog posted about the event just an hour or so before it started, and teased that the exfil could last up to two hours. If that is the case, it could offer some insight into when. The latest Call of Duty game collection may now be too big to fit the base 500GB PlayStation 4 hard drive (via IGN).According to the official Call of Duty blog, if you want to have the latest Call.

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The Call of Duty franchise is one of the strongest in video games, with more than 400 million copies sold to date.

Call of Duty: Warzone and Call of Duty: Black Ops — Cold War are moving to Season 3‘s new content today, and that gave us a reason to catch up with the boss, Rob Kostich. He’s the president of Activision Publishing and the head of the Call of Duty franchise.

There have been 19 different Call of Duty games since 2003, if you count both the free-to-play battle royale Warzone, which has been downloaded 100 million times, and Call of Duty: Mobile, which has been downloaded 300 million times. The franchise isn’t fatigued yet, and it has made it through some difficult times, such as the departure of its founding developers as Call of Duty went multi-studio development. It made the leap to free-to-play and its premium version is still selling extraordinarily well.

Popular streamer Nadeshot’s professional Esports team 100 Thieves recently got a slot on the Call of Duty League. The team is going to represent the Los Angeles region. As a part of its marketing and PR, it already has an official Twitter hand. Call of Duty: Warzone is celebrating its one-year anniversary with the Warzone Report, a feature that allows players to view their stats over the last 12 months. Fans are taking to Twitter to share. Sports Dallas Empire. Twitter trash talk has taken place of on-stage banter. How Call of Duty pros take to social media to charge up fanbases A March 1 exchange between Hastr0, JKap and CouRage.

I’ve long wondered what Activision’s vision and strategy are for the franchise. I got some answers from Kostich. He’s been thinking about the metaverse, the universe of virtual worlds that are all interconnected, like in novels such as Snow Crash and Ready Player One. And he’s been contemplating how to get us to come back to some part of Call of Duty, whether it’s Warzone or a mobile platform, every day of the year.

Next week, I’ll be interviewing his boss, Activision Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick onstage at our GamesBeat Summit 2021 event.

Here’s an edited transcript of our interview.

Above: Rob Kostich is president of Activion and head of Call of Duty.

GamesBeat: It seems like there’s been both deliberate and accidental steps in the evolution of Call of Duty. Zombies became this second or third experience that comes with the game. You had multiple studios launching the game, alternating every year. Then you had Warzone running year-round, and Call of Duty Mobile. How do you look at what’s deliberate and what’s opportunistic in that evolution?

Rob Kostich: We’ve been planning this a lot over the last few years. The one thing we started with, we had the premium business coming out every fall with Call of Duty. We wanted to do a lot of things, and one thing we saw was continuing to pull our community closer together. That happened when, before Modern Warfare launched, we started announcing cross-progression, crossplay, new season pass, changing our monetization system. Everything we can do to bring everyone together and provide free content to our fans at the same time. The big thing we wanted to do was get the community together and get them having fun.

Warzone was the thing that was transformational to all of it. Certainly not everyone on the planet has the ability to pay $60 or the equivalent to play Call of Duty. For my money, Call of Duty is the best moment-to-moment action experience there is. Warzone has allowed everyone to come in and experience Call of Duty. Now it’s become the focal point, the central point, the welcome mat if you will for the franchise as we go forward.

What’s important to us is we give all of our fans an incredible fun experience with Call of Duty, whether you’re free-to-play or premium, whoever you are. In Warzone that’s the first entry point, where you’ll experience the latest and greatest the franchise has to offer. You’ll go on a narrative journey with us through time. It’s the thing that’s transformed our business. It’s made our players more excited about our premium offerings as well. They get engaged in Call of Duty, all it has to offer across Zombies and everything else.

You mentioned mobile as well. Mobile’s been an incredible way — you’ve seen the headlines, where we’ve scaled to more than 300 million downloads. We have a nice scale on that business, and now we’re also launching in China. We’ve been able to tap into new audiences unlike ever before with the franchise. What’s fascinating is — I’ve certainly been around a long time, and it’s crazy. We launched the first Call of Duty in 2003. The franchise has never been bigger, been more relevant, and impacted more people in a positive way. We’re thrilled and excited about the prospects ahead of us as we continue to evolve the franchise for our community.

GamesBeat: What else is there to do for the franchise, and how do you structure the teams going forward to do that? It seems a lot more complex than just three studios trading off each year now. You have different studios doing different pieces, like multiplayer or Zombies. How does that structure look now?

Kostich: From a structure standpoint, one of the most important things for us — we have incredible development teams. As you know, in the creative process, wanting to keep these guys accountable and passionate about the things they work on — I can tell you one thing: They’re so passionate, whether they’re working on the premium games or Warzone, and how that’s impacted the community in such a positive way.

When we launched Warzone, that was launched in partnership with Infinity Ward and Raven. Raven is now taking over Warzone in terms of live ops as we move this thing forward into the future. They’ve done an amazing job. All of our studios are collaborating and participating in that process to make sure we do this in the right way going forward, integrating our offerings together in a way that the community is excited about.

Probably the greatest news for me is I’ve never seen our studios working together better than at this point in time. They’re super collaborative. They love the opportunity. They see how people are enjoying Warzone and everything we’re doing with Call of Duty. It’s been an awesome experience for the last 12 to 18 months, how our studios have come together and are charting the course for the future of Call of Duty right now.

GamesBeat: I hear there’s something like 2,000 people working on Call of Duty. That sounds very impressive, but it also sounds like you need more.

Kostich: I don’t know if we’ve actually disclosed a total number. But we have a very big team on this. What I’ll say is that we are hiring as we move into the future. We have so many opportunities in front of us. Most of our studios are hiring very aggressively right now. In particular, we’re hiring on the mobile front. As you know, on the world’s biggest platform, I think we have incredible opportunities to expand our franchise in even greater ways. We’re hiring across console and PC development. We’re hiring across mobile development. Our opportunities are bigger than they’ve ever been, and I mean that in terms of the community and the great experiences that we can provide them as we move forward.

Above: Dean Takahashi’s Warzone report: Not very impressive, but points for persevering.

GamesBeat: When you think about the most successful games in the past, people talk about market share, but it seems like what’s happening here is you’re getting a bigger share of time. How do you get people to come back to Call of Duty every day, rather than just every fall?

Kostich: We’ve gotten a bit of a crash course in that the last year, year-and-a-half or so, across what we’re doing in mobile, what we’re doing in console and PC as well. It’s pretty simple. We need to surprise and delight our community. We have to provide them with new ways to play, new experiences. With season three I think we’re doing a fun thing right now as we transition out of season two, into Rebirth Island in the middle as launch into season three. We’re providing new play spaces, new ways to play.

Our focus is continuing, in terms of Warzone, to push the battle royale genre forward in every way possible for our community. That’s what’s going to keep them coming back. Across our free-to-play and premium experiences, we need to keep pushing forward for our community. They deserve it. That’s what our development team is 100 percent committed to doing. For Warzone in particular we have plans years into the future now for the things we have to do. We’ve been thinking hard about this. We know how important it is to our fans. Our team is super excited to deliver on that for the community.

GamesBeat: Do you think fans would go for a Call of Duty metaverse?

Kostich: The opportunity is there for sure. Within Warzone we probably have more flexibility to explore things like that than ever before. We’re already starting to mix universes a bit. Most important, at its core, is that we provide an incredible Call of Duty experience to our fans, which we will absolutely do. There’s a lot of fun narrative things we can do over time now in the Call of Duty metaverse and how that evolves over the next few years.

GamesBeat: You’ve been quiet about the next Call of Duty. Are you shifting toward announcements later in the year for the new games? Last year was also fairly late in the cycle as far as revelations go.

Kostich: We’re probably shifting a bit more in that direction. Most of the reason is — you’ve seen what we have in Season 3 this week. We have so much to talk about and so much going on that’s happening this week. We want to focus on that with the community, focus on the journey with them. Also, as you saw last year, we did some cool things in terms of integrating the reveal of Black Ops into Warzone. Those are the things we want to orchestrate and provide to our community, letting them discover Call of Duty themselves in their play experience. That part’s been fun for us and our development teams. Marketing is changing within Call of Duty, how we get the community to participate and uncover things for us. It might be happening later, but it’s all part of a broader agenda to bring the community along on a fun journey.

Above: Action in Call of Duty: Black Ops — Cold War multiplayer.

GamesBeat: Can you explain a bit of what it’s like behind the scenes in responding to something like Warzone’s success? It seems like there’s a period of time when the success is so surprising that you have to come up with contingency plans, changing the direction to take advantage of opportunities. At some point you become caught up with it. How has that process happened in the past year? Do you feel like you’re caught up now?

Kostich: I don’t think anyone’s going to ever rest on their laurels or feel caught up. For us it’s just always the pursuit of what else we can do for our fans. To your question, I think we have a good sense of how to operate. When we first launched this thing, we launched seasons. We’re getting smarter with seasons. You’ll see that evolve for us even further in terms of how we navigate through seasons, how we end one and begin another, what we do in the midseason, how we surprise people throughout. We’re going to get even better on that front for the fans.

That part feels good. We need to hire more resources, but we’re just continuing to focus on innovating, pushing the genre forward, and providing incredible new play experiences for the community.

GamesBeat: How do you deal with things like the differences between the studios? Different game engines, different time frames they focus on. Then all of a sudden in Warzone, you’re going to put everything in there. It seems like you may have to shoehorn things that may or may not fit.

Kostich: We’ve been very focused on that in particular. One of the most important concepts for us is to make sure we limit any friction for our community as we go forward. What that means behind the scenes is making sure that from a technology perspective, everything feels seamless to the player. That’s a big focus for us as we move forward, so that as you transition from one experience to the next, as new weapons come in and out of the game, it feels like a solid, continuous play experience that evolves into the future. That’s also come from our development teams working together to make that — as you swap in and out from Warzone or a premium experience in the future, it’s seamless for our community. It’s been another passionate point for our team, to make sure we can provide the best experience possible for our fans as we go forward.

Call Of Duty Twitter Account

On the narrative front, the Call of Duty universe is super rich with everything we can do. That’s the fun part, taking people on that journey as we move it into the future.

Above: Season Three for Warzone and Black Ops Cold War multiplayer is upon us.

GamesBeat: It feels like putting Zombies into Warzone — it does tie narratives together. It seems like it might be tough to do that every year, though, to tie narratives together so closely that it’s almost one game with one narrative. Whereas before, some of the freshness came to the franchise because there were different branches going in very different directions. How do you balance some of that? Some players might want something totally different, like World War II or Infinite Warfare, those very different directions.

Kostich: They can be very different. The interesting part about Warzone is that we can, from an event perspective, bring stuff in and out of Warzone to keep it fresh, provide a new experience, and transition to new things. There’s no rule set that says we have to transition to Zombies once and they forever stay. Zombies may come in and out of Warzone. Other events might come in and out of Warzone. We might have special play experiences for our fans as we transition from one place to the other. That’s the real fun part. That’s where the flexibility is for us. The Call of Duty universe is so rich in content and its history of eras and stories and things we do. We think that provides an incredible platform for new, fresh experiences within the Warzone environment for our players.

As I mentioned before, Warzone being the central point of things going on, people understand all the great things that are happening in the franchise. If they want to get a deeper experience with a certain aspect of Call of Duty, we have those premium experiences, which will differ. You’re very familiar with the franchise. You know how they differ very well. They tug a lot of different strings, whether you’re playing Modern Warfare or Black Ops or something historical. It’s great to get those experiences, but we can take parts of those and fuse them into Warzone in the longer term or for a limited time, making that fun and interesting for the community.

GamesBeat: You have a very strong rumor community. There’s a certain group that trades and thrives on that process. What can you do about setting the record straight or otherwise communicating more in that kind of environment? I’ve heard things like, “The guns come out overpowered and then they get nerfed, because that causes people to come back to the new season and pay more.” “Activision doesn’t care about stopping cheaters.” “Activision doesn’t care about file size.” There’s almost a conspiracy theory approach to everything that happens around the game. How do you channel that in a better direction?

Above: Verdansk, the home of Warzone, has been visited by 100 million players. Not so many have come out alive.

Kostich: There’s two parts to that. One is communication, and the other is action. We’ll continue to do a better and better job of communicating with the community very frequently. In terms of action, to some of our points, you talk about the cheating. You’re familiar with this space. Any large-scale free-to-play game gets attacked about those not-good actors who are out there. You’ve probably seen that we’ve banned more than 475,000 accounts now. We have a dedicated security team. We’re investing more resources there to make sure we provide the best possible experience for our fans. We have to take action, and also communicate about that, which we’re going to do.

As far as other aspects of the business, it’s the same way. You talked about file size, for example. That’s an interesting one. When we launched Warzone, our goal was to make the best-looking, best-playing battle royale experience on the planet. I think we accomplished that. With that, though, there’s a bit of a file size that we recognize. We also have a team that’s continuously focused on taking down that footprint for our fans so they can better manage their inventory of games. We’re working on all the things you mentioned very aggressively on behalf of the community, and we’ll continue to do a better job of communicating with them.

As you know, it’s a very small world nowadays. News travels very fast. Sometimes it goes in weird directions, for whatever reason. For us it’s about communication and action. At the bottom line, providing the best possible game imaginable for our fans. Across what we’re doing, across console and PC, across mobile, I mentioned this at the beginning, but the franchise has never been better, frankly. We’ve never had more opportunity in front of us. We’re excited, and more than anything we’re thankful for our community and their support. We’re more passionate than ever to surprise and delight them in the future.

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Call of Duty: Black Ops — Cold War gets its big Season 3 update tonight with four more multiplayer maps, six new weapons, and a new chapter of Zombies in Outbreak.

At noon Thursday, the Season 3 update will arrive for Call of Duty: Warzone, the free-to-play battle royale version of Call of Duty. And earlier today, Activision Blizzard said that the Call of Duty franchise has now surpassed 400 million copies sold since its 2003 debut.

Normally, this is the time of year when Activision unveils the first details of its new game slated for the fall. But with the success of Warzone and the year-round nature of Call of Duty now, the seasonal update has become a much bigger deal than it was before. Cold War’s developers are Raven Software and Treyarch, with Treyarch focusing more on multiplayer now and Raven taking on Warzone.

Players are in the midst of following a Warzone narrative where Zombies took over the battle royale map, the city of Verdansk, and saw it go up in a mushroom cloud as authorities exploded a nuclear missile on the city in order to stop the Zombies. The event will conclude at noon Pacific time on Thursday.

I like the intertwining of the storylines between Cold War, Zombies, and Warzone — at least for now. I liked the battle that took place on Mount Yamantau in the Cold War game, and I’m glad to see a new multiplayer map based on that location. Otherwise, I’m looking forward to seeing more of it as the new season gets under way.

New file sizes

Above: New operator in Call of Duty: Black Ops — Cold War.

Cold War’s four new multiplayer maps include three 6-versus-5 maps: Yamantau, Diesel, and Standoff. Duga is a multi-team map. Sticks and Stones returns as a kind of melee mode, and the update also brings a new multi-team elimination mode. And Cold War’s file size will range from 8.1GB to 13.1GB, down from previous sizes.

“We’re continually updating that we recently had the feature to actively select which sections of the game get loaded,” said Amos Hodge, the creative director at Raven Software, in a press briefing. “It’s the amount of content. It’s a single player, it’s zombies, it’s MP, it’s Warzone. It’s like four games. We’re continually working on file size. We know it’s an issue. You’ll see it get better.”

The Warzone/Cold War multiplayer narrative will tie together the plots of Zombies, Warzone, and Cold War into a single narrative. In Season 3, the teams have to rescue of CIA agent Russel Adler, who has been kidnapped by Naga. That will give the bad guy, Stitch, time to execute his grand plan. Cold War will have limited-time events, operators, and in-game challenges. The three new operators are: Wraith, Knight, and Antonov. Captain Price will also arrive in Cold War multiplayer as a Legendary Operator.

The teams are still collaborating remotely, Hodge said. He said remote testing has made it easier to see how players experience the game.

“Working from home has helped us in a couple of ways. It has made communicating with other studios easier. Playtesting is a big pit, and it’s almost like a LAN environment. Everyone’s yelling. Sometimes gameplay can seem more fun when it’s not. What’s fun there is the camaraderie, the LAN party vibe.”

Those who purchase any version of Black Ops: Cold War at the start of Season Three will receive the Captain Price Operator for use in Black Ops: Cold War and Warzone. Plus, anyone who already owns Black Ops: Cold War will automatically receive the Captain Price Operator at the start of Season Three.

The weapons include the PPSh-41 SMG, the Swiss K31 Sniper Rifle, Ballistic Knife melee weapon, the CARV.2 Tactical Rifle, the AMP63: Pistol, and the baseball bat melee weapon. Let’s hope that there is nothing overpowered here, as we need good weapons but nothing that is going to disrupt the gameplay again.

New maps

Above: A friendly guy in Call of Duty: Black Ops — Cold War multiplayer.

Yamantau (6-vs.-6, launch week)

Cod Black Ops Cold War Twitter

Teams will fight through the crumbled remains of the Soviet observatory on Mount Yamantau. They will battle through a massive downed satellite dish, snowy interiors, and broken catwalks. You’ll be able to fast-rope up and over your enemies to get the jump on the competition.

Diesel (6-vs.-6/2-vs.-2/3-vs.-3, launch week)

In the desert, players will gear up fights in Gunfight mode on this fast-paced map. You can battle around a gas station and its surrounding buildings in the middle of the badlands.

Standoff (6-vs.-6, in-season)

This Black Ops II classic is coming back to Cold War multiplayer. Compete on this medium-sized map, which features three lanes of approach and has plentiful opportunities for outsmarting your opponents. Watch those buildings and mind the van over near the hay bales.

Duga (multi-team, in-season)

You can deploy your squad to the Ural Mountains in this expansive new Multi-Team environment. Duga offers playstyles, whether you prefer to move through the central admin offices for close-range battles, or work your way around the perimeter through the bus depot to the chemical processing plant for sniping. You can also climb atop the array tower for a view before parachuting off to your destination of choice.

More changes

With the Ballistic Knife’s return, multiplayer will feature the return of the Sticks and Stones party mode. Prestige levels will also be expanded to 15 levels. The update also has a new Scorestreak, or reward for doing well in a match, dubbed Strafe Run, where you can have a pair of jet fighters strafe part of the map. It also has a new cargo truck.

Dead Ops Arcade 3, a funny coin-op version of Zombies, receives new improvements this week, including an adjustment to XP gains and updates to the Mamaback boss fight.

Season Three also brings a new round of weapon tuning to Black Ops Cold War. This tuning pass brings adjustments across the board to the Light Machine Gun class, tightening up some of the areas where LMGs were particularly versatile compared to other classes. The Shotgun class also gets some changes, including tweaks to the Streetsweeper to remove its 1-hit kill potential and rein in its damage values.

The developers also made some tuning changes in the Assault Rifle, Submachine Gun, and Tactical Rifle departments, such as attachment updates for the FFAR 1, sprint speed updates for SMGs, and more.

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• Newsletters, such as DeanBeat
• The wonderful, educational, and fun speakers at our events
• Networking opportunities
• Special members-only interviews, chats, and 'open office' events with GamesBeat staff
• Chatting with community members, GamesBeat staff, and other guests in our Discord
• And maybe even a fun prize or two
• Introductions to like-minded parties