• Posted December 12th, 2008 at 11:15 EDT by
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Infinity Ward's Community Manager, Robert Bowling, had excited fans of the popular shooter Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare with expectations of an updated playlist to look forward to.

Unfortunately, six months down the road, and the playlist has ultimately failed to materialise. With the release of Call of Duty: World at War and the announcement of a sequel to Modern Warfare from Infinity Ward, this shouldn't come as much of a surprise.

Bowling, however, has taken the time to explain why the new playlist never saw the light of day, along with reason why updates were less than forthcoming.

“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.”

While it's a tad disappointing to see support for Modern Warfare tossed aside, it's understandable to that the developers want to offer more to gamers for future products. Do you think Infinity Ward should have went ahead with this broken promise or is holding off to offer more up in the sequel the better option of the two?

Let us know your thoughts.

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