We Speak To Activision About Modern Warfare 3's First DLC

The first content drop for Modern Warfare 3 is set to launch on January 24th, and we had a chance to talk to Infinity Ward's creative strategist Robert Bowling about what to expect.

GI: Modern Warfare 3’s DLC will be released via “content drops” over the next nine months. Tell me about how this schedule will be different than the DLC packs in previous Call of Duty games.

Bowling: What we’re doing this year is, we have an entire season of content starting January 24th and going through September. How this will work is every month, we’ll have content drops. These are the individual drops that are available first for Elite subscribers. They come out first for Elite subscribers, very first on Xbox Live, they start giving feedback on it, and that will help dictate our future design decisions. Once the content drops come out, they will be collected into collections, and these collections will be available to everyone regardless of whether you subscribe to Elite or not. That’s when you can buy all the content drops prior to that point into one collection.

Two maps are set to release on the 24th. Will these initially be unavailable if you don’t subscribe to Elite?

Correct. The first content drop is on January 24th, which includes Liberation and Piazza. It’s for Elite subscribers on Xbox Live, and then we’ll have staggered releases for Elite subscribers on the other platform shortly after that.

If you’re not an Elite subscriber, what’s the timeframe for when these maps will be available, and how much will they cost individually?

I don’t have a price point on the collection, but the first collection that includes these drops comes out in March.

As for the maps themselves, tell us a little about what we can expect from Liberation and Piazza.

Liberation and Piazza are both designed to be very different from what you’ve experienced in Modern Warfare 3 already. Not only in terms of the gameplay variety that they offer, but also visually. Liberation is all about that different type of gameplay. It’s a more wide open map than what you see in the traditional maps in Modern Warfare 3. It takes place in Central Park, right after the battle of New York. It’s very military zone heavy, and you have turrets on either side of the map. Really great for objective game types like Domination, because it’s more wide open. You have longer sight lines, more area to fight in. Piazza is very different, and it’s all about that close range, close quarters combat. A lot of tight corridors, but most importantly, it’s all about that verticality. It takes place on an Italian seaside mountainside. You’re fighting this uphill battle, so there’s a lot of verticality, a lot of areas you need to be checking, and it adds a totally new dynamic to the type of gameplay it offers.

If you had to break down the overall DLC content this year, how much of it would consist of multiplayer maps and how much of it would consist of Spec Ops missions?

We don’t know yet. The full schedule isn’t set in stone by any means. We’re going to take the feedback from the Elite subscribers when they get it early and from the collections to help dictate what we want to prioritize and focus on moving forward. We’ve really left it open to do more than just multiplayer maps and to do more than just Spec Ops missions. We want to do a whole variety of stuff. We want to do game modes, we want to do mission-focused stuff, we want to do all kinds of stuff that we’ve never done before. We’ve really told the teams involved at Infinity Ward and Sledgehammer and Raven, “Do whatever you want. As long as it fits in the Modern Warfare universe, have fun with it. Just experiment and we’re gonna take the best of the best and start slotting it in.”