Greg Reisdorf on Fixing Fallout 5 Gunplay, Call of Duty Esports and the Future of Competitive Games

Greg Reisdorf has sent Todd Howard a come and get me plea if he wants to fix the gunplay in Fallout 5 in an exclusive interview with Hellcase.

The former Creative Director for Multi-Player on Call of Duty also gave his views on whether Activision should create a separate version of the game to compete more directly with Counter- Strike 2.

In a wide-ranging interview, Reisdorf explained how he is working to give players the ability to earn real money from their favourite games through user-generated content, and considered the prospects for Deadlock compared to what happened to Concord and Highguard.

Read the full interview below.

Q: Was there ever any discussions about creating a dedicated version of Call Of Duty that sat outside of the annual release schedule to act as a stable, continuous esports platform like Counter-Strike?

I’m sure it was talked about at some point in time. It always came up in development: why are we doing this over and over again? It was always a topic of conversation with players and within the devs because you are redoing it over and over again.

You don’t spend a ton of time and hundreds and thousands of hours getting good at something to have it uprooted and changed the next day and to have to redo it all again. It’s not like being a great professional athlete. You’ve mastered those skills over your lifetime, and you’ve mastered the skills of using the controller and everything else, but not really the rules of the game, because the rules of the game are changing every year or even each season for that matter.

I think there’s a ton of advantages to doing it. It’s certainly been tried over the years. One of the things that has hindered it is that annual release. From a financial point of view, they’re certainly going to push on the yearly release because you want to get that income each year. But I think there might have been some hope for Warzone being able to do that and have that consistency across the years.

Ultimately, even if it’s a subsection of the game or its own mode, you saw that with the competitive side, the esports side. You started to see that go over each year with similar rule sets and everything else and expanding on that. That was a challenge because the studios are so different and every year new features were coming in.

That is specifically challenging but it would be a great idea, especially for consumers and for players, to get in there and know it. You see awesome stuff happening with Counter-Strike, and that’s been around forever. They would have to find other ways to monetize that in a constructive way because at the end of the day you have to feed the beast that is Activision. If they stop doing yearly cycles and start thinking in terms of longevity for the franchise and the brand, it could be interesting.

Q: Are Activision missing a trick by not making greater efforts to replicate their own version of the Counter-Strike skins economy that makes Valve so much money?

Yeah, I mean, that’s a great model for the community as well within the community marketplace in Steam, where people can go and trade those things. That’s entirely what I’ve built my new company Oncade around: the mindset that you can build your community with them invested in what you’re creating, where they can work within that and build careers around it too, which is something you can’t really do inside the Steam marketplace because you can’t get that money out.

There’s a lot of opportunity for games that can use their community and work with their community to create more content. That’s ultimately the live ops treadmill that games get on, where they can’t keep up with the demand for content. If you can offset that with the community, and your fans are the ones who love it, they’re your champions. They know what people want within the game, and they can provide those items and the cool stuff.

That is, to me, the future of gaming as a whole. You’re seeing this constriction of the industry. Funding is down. Everything is down. The player count doesn’t move. Games are just swapping players back and forth. For gamers, it’s the same. But it’s going to be harder to get higher-end games because nobody is going to fund them and the risk is too high.

The next version of the industry needs to start bringing players into that and allowing them to build UGC. We call it managed UGC, because when people hear UGC, it could be anything. But if it’s managed UGC, where you’re allowing players to create within the boundaries of the design you’ve created, there’s a lot of potential.

Q: Is part of the pitch with Oncade that it’s a different route for game developers to make money than keep pushing the price of games up to $100 and beyond?

Yeah, exactly. That is one of the ways to look at it. Your champions, your fans, rather than you spending a crazy amount of time and development budget trying to create things nobody wants, you enable your fans to make things that people actually want because you’re now able to revenue-share with them and give them a little piece of that pie or let them get that money out.

That’s a huge factor for how we see it working. Even our plans exist within the UGC world, where I can make a tree for your level, and your level exists in a game, and when somebody plays that, we can all get paid for it in a meaningful way, with everything attributed correctly.

There are a lot of ways to use it, and we’re excited about how that plays out within the games that are starting to come out.

Q: When you look at Bethesda and their Creator Club for games like Fallout and Elder Scrolls, are you saying that in the future it will go even further where players could build an income and cash in royalty cheques for adding things into their favourite games?

Yeah, exactly. And being able to do that, especially within the mod communities themselves as well, on game servers, wherever people go and want to go. They’re investing their time into this and they’re creating these worlds for people to explore, and most of the time they just get a pat on the back and say, thanks man, good job.

A lot of the time that’s great, but it would be even better if people could continue to do that more and do that full-time because they can go pay the bills with it, and they can make sure they have clean running water that’s warm.

Q: Is the idea to also make it so that mods-turned-games like Counter-Strike can succeed more easily and breakthrough?

Yeah, for sure. I think the problem that a lot of games have today is discoverability. Because there are so many games, I think the report that I read the other day was that there are 120,000 new games, which is mind-numbing to me.

They don’t have any market share, they have a hard time getting out and visible to players. One of the things you start to see is more and more games offering mods and those types of things for UGC and being able to use that community to start essentially a mod where you can use that distribution of the larger game to go out and get seen and then be able to easily bring that income in and create more from there is really what we’re after.

Q: Given the merchandise deals and other streams of incomes for esports pros, could this be something else they add into that mix too? Maybe signature weapons or items in a game from a leading pro as we see with stars from traditional sports with their boot deals and other equipment?

Yeah, for sure. And those creator ecosystems are massive. Those are ultimately the tastemakers that exist and you’re starting to see it with AI and everything else.

The barrier to actually make something is being removed. To make something good, you actually have to have an eye for what is good and what matters, so you have these esports players who are amazing at games who know what needs to happen but they may not know the technical details of what it means to have a vertical recoil of X, Y, Z, but they know this gun needs to function this way.

Eventually, within a few years, they’ll be able to prompt something in and get fairly close.

Q: Given your career has been heavily invested in shaping and perfecting multiplayer balance and feel, how did you approach trying to tame peeker’s advantage and players exploiting network weaknesses during your time working on Call of Duty?

Oh, yeah. There’s snaking. That’s been a big deal for a while. Every time you have a third- person motion with a first-person motion, the first-person player may see something different

from the third-person because you’re trying to match up those animations, especially on the server. That’s what you start to see when you’re doing snaking, and you can snake around corners and those types of things as well. You’re ultimately playing between the server and the client. A lot of that exists with everything server-side authority that is happening there and trying to maintain that and make sure that is matched as closely as possible within the latency you have between games.

Ultimately, a lot of that is testing: frame-by-frame testing, latency testing, looking at the network configs you have and how you’re routing things. There was a lot of stuff early on with lag switches and those types of things, and trying to defeat those and minimize those actions as much as possible. That’s always there, and that’s part of the multiplayer ecosystem you’re playing in. Everyone is always going to try to exploit what you’re doing, especially in a slightly anonymous world where you’re not sitting over somebody’s shoulder watching them play.

They’re going to try anything they can to get an edge.

Q: Can technology ultimately reduce that problem to the level it becomes imperceptible?

It’s a great question. I think at some point it’ll get close. It just takes a lot of work because the more room you have to make things, you will always fill the gap that is there. As soon as you’re like, we have these awesome tools and we’re able to do all this cool stuff, you’re like, cool, let’s pack it until it doesn’t work anymore. And then, oh, it doesn’t work anymore. All right, we have to fine-tune this and make sure everything’s perfect.

Making sure all of your network routes and everything else within the game and where the networking calls are happening are super optimized for what your game is doing. In a shooter, it’s the most important thing you can have because as soon as somebody goes, “The game is a joke because it’s not doing what I think it’s doing,” or “it’s not showing me the correct thing,” it’s broken at that point.

Q: Did you and the team get Call of Duty into the best possible place you could on it?

Call of Duty is great for what it is. You’re taking milliseconds off. And even then you’re getting into frames and all that kind of stuff where it’s much more about things outside of your control: how the network is working, how many routes it’s taking between where you live and where the server is, and how that is routing. Sometimes you might be five miles away from your server, but because of the way the lines are routed, it goes around a mountain to get there, so it takes 20 miles. The way the crow flies, you’re closer, and it should be faster, but it’s not.

There are a lot of those things. It’s pretty good on the Call of Duty side. Ultimately, every year it’s trying to make it that much better.

Q: The whole Valve thing with the subtick system versus 128 tick. Do you have any thoughts on why Valve might be reluctant to rethink that?

I am not familiar with that conversation. In general, server ticks are huge. You want to go as fast as possible because that’s when you’re checking and looking at things. There is a lot of technical wizardry I am not familiar enough with. There are people who are very experienced

with that work. For me, it was more like, we have to run at 60, or we shouldn’t be running at 120, I wish we could get there. It’s a very technical issue and I don’t know enough about it.

It’s a super complex thing. Making a single-player game without craziness is very difficult. Then to network everybody together instantly at the same time, that’s super hard. You’re dropping frames and packets and latency and all the other buzzwords. It gets very hairy quickly.

Q: Counter-Strike purists say Call of Duty has aim assist and is therefore less of a true shooter. Do you think that’s a fair argument or is it just too different to compare like that?

I think it’s just different. Games in general each have their own feel and vibe.

With Counter-Strike, it’s all PC. You’re there with a mouse and keyboard and you can get exact accuracy. If you’ve ever tried to play Call of Duty on a console without aim assist, it’s a terrible experience.

They’re different. You could do mouse and keyboard only for Call of Duty and all of the esports are on PC but it is a different game. Different weapons, and that yearly release is difficult. You’re getting new weapons every time, new features every time. You can’t cut it down as easily as you can with CS:GO and CS2 and say, this is exactly what’s happening, because it’s going to change every year. Until that stops changing, it’s going to be very difficult.

Q: What’s your view on the best route to handling cheaters in competitive play?

Ultimately it comes down to human accountability.

Anti-cheat on hardware and software is always going to have issues. If you can read it, you can get to it. It becomes knowing who is behind the keyboard and holding them accountable at some level.

That could be like an anti-money laundering process where you’re doing know-your-customer checks. With Oncade, we do a lot more with anti-money laundering and know your customer. It’s an interesting avenue for matchmaking: this person is real, not a bot, not cheating.

If they are cheating, they get kicked out for good and can’t come back, no matter how many PS5s they buy and hack. The human nature of it, being able to actually pin it to an individual person, is the most critical thing there is. And a lot of that is not truly hardware or software solutions.

Q: Could the answer lie in tying a player’s behaviour in games to their ability to earn money from those games based on the system we were talking about earlier?

Maybe. Yeah. I mean, there are some people out there who are trying it. It is a lot. It is a friction point. It is a huge friction point. And most of the time in games, you’re trying to remove as much friction as possible.

It was even a big deal to have you put a phone number in to prove that you’re real. And then we can only have one phone number per person and all that kind of stuff. I don’t know how many people would want to go get their social security card or put a picture of their passport in.

I guess if you’re logging into Call of Duty or Counter-Strike and it’s through an account that you’re earning money through from making a mod or something, you’re going to be more motivated to not fall foul of the rules, right?

Q: Could the rising cost of consoles and hardware ultimately be a good thing for gamers and gaming in the long run if it forces developers to chase things other than graphical fidelity to make tighter, more competitive titles?

Yeah. It certainly could be. I don’t know if there will ever be a lack of desire to have something be more realistic or more beautiful, to push the high end. It will certainly be interesting as more and more AI gets online, and it starts doing the predictive, world generation stuff, which would be a very interesting place for esports. I’m not saying that should ever happen, but it is an interesting world.

Esports in general, it’s this sort of inflection point between the theme of the game, like Call of Duty where it’s guns and bullets and all of that or CS:GO or CS2, and then the other side is the pure mechanic side of it. You could just do white boxes. I think Halo 5 tried it, where they basically had white boxes, where it was just an arena. It looked like the holodeck or something and that was it, and it was pure.

It doesn’t need to look like a game. It just needs to look like a sticker on a ball, almost like a sport. But if you were to do that, I don’t think it would be nearly as successful as if you had the theme that existed alongside it, and the worlds you get to explore and play in.

There was a constant argument within the team that no, there shouldn’t be any recoil. There shouldn’t be any recoil on guns because it should be a laser, because this is an esport. And if we add recoil, if there is any bit of randomness to it, then we can’t have that.

Then you have the other side, which was like, no, it needs to feel like you’re in a combat scenario and this is mil-sim stuff.

That is the dichotomy that exists that you’re trying to find this balance every time and it’s so interesting because I don’t know how many esports exist that don’t have a compelling theme or an artistic vision to them. I don’t even know what you would put on the screen, honestly. But it’s an interesting thing to think about, especially when you’re talking about hardware and who is going to push the hardware further.

Q: Does the success of titles like Overwatch, Valorant and others show that actually there is a value to updated graphics and art design that could add to the load on hardware in the esports and competitive gaming space?

Yeah, so there is still a theme to it, but it’s not necessarily pushing the hardware nearly as far or as hard.

Also, the level of fidelity can cause issues when you start going too far with it. Sometimes in Call of Duty, what you started to get was visual noise on screen that was stopping you from being able to see your players and anything else. That was a huge thing that we dealt with, the visibility of other players in the environment.

As you start to get more visual noise on the screen, you start to lose players at distances. You start doing different things with fog levels and how you’re doing rim lighting on characters at distances and those types of things. At the point, it starts to degrade the visual experience for the normal players who are after the best-looking thing possible, but it’s not necessarily real because you’re fudging the numbers.

Q: Given the failures of Concord and Highguard or late, has it never been easier for motivated players to sabotage a game they take against?

Yeah, they can. They’ve always been able to do that, honestly. It’s an interesting place to be with games because you’re ultimately making the game for the player who is going to buy it.

Maybe they’re going to buy it, maybe they’re going to play it free depending on your business model. But at the end of the day, if you’re just making the game for yourself, cool, that’s great, go make it for yourself, but don’t expect people to buy it.

And I think that’s where you start talking about community. Community is really your audience. How do you get your audience to be part of your game? It’s about knowing your audience, knowing what they want, knowing how they’re going to respond to things. The earlier you can get that audience involved and start bringing them on where they don’t eat you alive and feel invested in it, the better.

There is a point in time where it’s like, okay, let’s bring the audience in. But I don’t think there is a world where you could make a game today and spend three years on it and not show it to your audience before then. You should probably be showing it as soon as you can get a build. Early on in the industry, when I was at EA and early on at Activision, there was a fear about keeping our secrets and other things about the game that they didn’t want us to give away.

I get there is something to be said for marketing on the bigger side of things. We’re going to go spend half a billion dollars on marketing or whatever. You don’t want to ruin that marketing cadence or that go-to-market push. But for basically anybody else who is not already working on a top ten game, you’re going to want to bring your audience with you. You’re going to want them there. You’re going to want them to be your champions because word of mouth is the biggest thing out there.

If you’re worried about people stealing your ideas or whatever, don’t. Sure, maybe, but honestly, it’s about execution. Ideas are a dime a dozen. Being able to execute and being able to know and prioritize what the key ideas are, and be able to use that and bounce that off your community and your audience, is the way to do it.

Q: What have you made of the more iterative approach of the team behind Deadlock compared to what went wrong with Concord and Highguard?

Yeah, they are willing to listen. They also have the luxury of not having to care when they launch or anything. There is also the thing that the community does not see and the players themselves.

And this is not to say that this is an excuse for anybody, but those internal workings of how those games got made, how they got funding to begin with, where that funding came from, all of that, you never hear that story and you are never going to hear that story. The players should not have to care about it. But at the same time, those often drive how people are bringing the communities in and when they are bringing the communities in, which is unfortunate. This is just the way the world works. It is not fair. It sucks. Sorry.

Q: If you were to advise another that wanted to go and create the next great PvP game, as an esports title or otherwise, what would be your advice and what are the major pitfalls they have to avoid?

Scope is huge. You can be ambitious but you cannot be overly ambitious.

The initial pitch for Oncade was we were going to build a 1v1 shooter and you were going to be able to gamble on it. We could play, we have our audiences, you put up your QR code, your audience bets on you, my audience bets on me, and whoever wins gets the payout. And that is what it is.

If you are trying to build a shooter, 1v1, focus on the mechanics, focus on the netcode, focus on that small environment, the smallest box you can that is playable and functional, and get it in people’s hands and start letting them play it over and over again.

And then build on it and be like, cool, we got 1v1 working. Here is a cool map. Check it out. Here is a second map. It is dope. Go play it. Go have fun. Release it. Full game. There it is. It is free to play, whatever. And then your players are constantly playing it. Maybe you do not have players after three weeks and you are like, well, that sucks. We should do something. What happened? Where did they go? Did they not know about it? Was it not fun? Then start asking. Do not wait three years to get that information.

Because your spend is going to go crazy. So start small, very, very small, and focus on the guns and how they feel, the hit markers, the visual feedback you are giving the player, focus on the control. You are going to learn a lot about aim assist right away because you are just trying to do that. Thankfully you do not have to worry about other players crossing in front of you yet.

And once you get that going, then try 2v2. Then try some of the more ambitious things, and then you get larger maps and everything else. The nice part with 1v1 is you do not need a huge map. One weapon could all be the same weapon. It does not have to be crazy. We had 1v1 in World War II in the little hub area. It was great because you just forced people to use the same weapons, forced them to use the same loadouts, everything. You do not have to do UI, you do not have to do anything like that. Just ease in, ease in. And if you can build that, if somebody builds that, their 1v1 shooter, how much money could that take? Somebody could do it easily.

Q: Is it unhelpful to frame games as a potential Call of Duty killer or a Counter-Strike killer or do you think there is an opportunity for the right game with the right focuses to come in and find a hole in that top level?

Yes. I certainly think there is. Whether somebody knows it going in is a very different story. Being able to say, “that is the game,” you are kidding yourself if you are going to do that.

It is more shots on goal. It is like, hey, I am going to go build 100 shooters, and I am going to do it within a year. Okay. Cool. I will bet on that. One of those is going to do something. And so it is a bit more of, especially now, you can go and prototype.

I was going to say you could go prototype it in UEFN or you could go prototype it in almost Roblox in a way, but those are for shooters specifically against something like Call of Duty and I mean, you are really just talking about Call of Duty at that point. Or maybe Apex. Fortnite is not really a shooter. First person shooters, it is only going to be Call of Duty at that point. But to go up against that, you are going to have to do some hardcore structural changes to netcode and those types of things to get in there and do that.

But for anything else, if you have a great story idea or a great mode idea, you should be in Roblox, you should be in UEFN and make that there. If you are not doing it, you are probably overspending and setting yourself up for some failure.

Q: Do we need to get back to those old school, sweaty, high-barrier-to-entry tactical shooters of years gone by to follow the ‘git gud’ trend set by FromSoftware’s success?

Well, I think it depends on what you want. If you can specify your goal and what you are trying to do and then align your spend to that goal. A hardcore shooter could be super successful if you are not putting hundreds of millions of dollars into it and you are making it the right size for the audience you have. The audience that exists for a hardcore shooter is smaller than a casual shooter. Just go on the record and say that, because it is.

And I think that is the difference and the expectation you have to set for yourself and your team if you are going to go out there and try to hit that. If you are going to go after Call of Duty, then you should probably go after more of a casual arcade shooter with a slight tilt toward the mil-sim stuff.

Q: The rumor is that the PS6 will slip with the PS5 Pro needing to carry this generation for longer. Does the lack of a new console to develop and optimise for actually make it easier to innovate and do something different with the same platform?

For sure. Not having to support a ton of different hardware devices and all that is great for that. I do not know if that is what that means. From a business perspective, it probably means you just do not have as many engineers, or you do not need that other team, the outsourcing team that was managing the port to the other device. On a smaller team scale, it probably helps a lot of smaller teams because they do not have to worry about that anymore.

But idealistically, yes. Do I believe it? No

Q: Do you think there is still enough headroom in the PS5 Pro era to do some interesting things with games coming out in the next few years?

Yeah, I think there is room. There are amazing engineers working on that stuff. I forget which console it was, but one of them, maybe PS2 or maybe PS4, but toward the end of the life is when you start to get major features online that have been like, we have waited years for this thing to come online. We have always wanted it. Now we finally get it because we had the time, our software is mature enough, we can understand what it does and how it is going to react in this situation.

Imagine all of the work that goes into the Unreal Engine and everything, and that team is massive, and they are cranking away at it. Now they do not have to work with new hardware for a couple of years. Every time the hardware changed during the console cycles, it was a huge undertaking. Especially when you are talking about things like netcode and very specific, very low-level functions that exist. Being able to fine tune those and hone those in over a couple of years is huge.

Q: Deadlock’s developers have joked that the CS2 community also say they want big updates and then freak out the minute any changes come in. What is your experience of working in that sort of situation with CoD, and is it better to have more updates and keep up with the audience or draw a line and say no?

That is true. I have that same experience. I think setting expectations is probably the best way to do it. What those are and what that expectation is depends on your life cycle and when you are trying to do so.

Call of Duty is a year-long life cycle. You know it is happening very quickly. All your players are coming or are going to be gone in six months or whatever it is. I think it is four months or something. And something like Counter-Strike, those players are there, and they are expecting this, and it is more of a cadence and being able to make those. But there is also a yes, we are going to set expectations, but we are not going to tell you everything exactly that is going into it, because if we told you that, then you would not care about the update because you already feel like you had the update. So there is a bit of the psychological, I have to give you the bonus on top of it just to keep you engaged and keep you there.

Q: Call of Duty Warzone Mobile is now shutting down. They have announced it for April. Does that surprise you or do you think it was a bit of an experiment in the first place to test out ideas?

Yeah. I was surprised it was still running. When I saw that the other day, I was like, it is still on. That is interesting. It was cool because it used the same engine. It was a very cool advancement. Sledgehammer had a decent amount to do with that. There were a ton of other people. I do not mean to take it away from anybody else, but it was also like we were involved with it and it was cool. It was a very interesting, exciting moment to have maps and everything else that we had made running on mobile, almost pixel for pixel what was there, same engine running. And it was awesome. And it just burned up phones and did not really work. There were other issues with it.

You have to look at that and reflect on the industry and consumers and the players as a whole. It is like, okay, well you have this, but at the same time you had Call of Duty Mobile as well, which was also doing great, which is a completely different engine and basically made very differently. But it has the brand, and it uses the brand, and it uses a lot of the things that make it what it is. They have also expanded it across all of the themes within Call of Duty. So you have everybody kind of congealed together, zombies in there, all this other stuff in there. There are a lot of things in there that I look at and go, wow, that is impressive, what Call of Duty Mobile was able to do. And then Warzone trying to do similar things, or Call of Duty Warzone Mobile trying to do similar things, but then it was almost restricted by being attached to Call of Duty so much.

Being attached to the mainline premium version where they could not get to where the audience was. It is a really interesting experiment. It is not really an experiment. It is an interesting failure of trying to take something and make something happen. It was a technical marvel. I do not know how. Even though it burned up, even though it burned my hands, it was fun.

Q: Is Warzone Mobile shutting down a precursor to Warzone itself facing problems with Grand Theft Auto VI on the horizon or they are just two completely separate things?

Yeah, I think they are completely separate audiences. I think there was hope at some point that they would be similar audiences, like you basically continue the play and get your playtime longer on individuals that are already in your audience. I do not know what those numbers were, but clearly it did not work, whatever it was.

Q: Do you think that as much as it might have been a failure, the technical gains and learnings from Warzone Mobile could put Activision and other companies in a good position to respond to the rising costs of videogames if the industry goes more mobile first?

Yeah. For mobile, it is interesting. You are competing for people’s time. Ultimately, there is a report that just came out the other day with a bunch of numbers in it. It was, oh hey, everybody is going to TikTok short form videos, gambling and iGaming, and all these things are taking up people’s time away from playing games.

It is such an interesting world because you have Roblox, which is crazy through the roof. When I look at that data and parse it, I am like, okay, the kids cannot gamble yet, and they cannot do all of these things. They are not on TikTok or short form video, but they are playing the game, and they are spending the time in there. They may not be playing. It is probably more of a social network for them.

And then you have all of the adults on the other hand who want to be entertained, and so they are entertaining themselves through short form videos and through things they do not necessarily need to invest a ton of time into to get better at or to learn or to feel like they have a skill in something. You could have a skill in a Polymarket style thing, but the idea that you are now competing between somebody’s mobile phone or their console or their PC, it is all going to come down to convenience and what is the most convenient.

If I can play on my mobile phone and have it show up on my TV because I am in the room and it is there, that is a huge win. You have to go where the players are. There are way more phones than PS5s. It is going to be interesting.

Q: From your experience of making microtransactions work games, what are your thoughts on the idea of having more adverts when you boot up your console and access the store, or increasing subscription costs?

On the hardware side, that is a really interesting situation. I am sure they are looking at ads and all kinds of feature unlocks and everything else. Do you want full self-driving on your PS5? All right, get into the subscription and we will unlock it for you. Or do you want 4K? Do you want 6K? That is an interesting space to be in.

The one I am curious about is who is going to break the seal on ads in free to play console games. Or who is going to go, when you pause the game, where is that ad that is going to show up for buying your Doritos or whatever? When I go to the pause screen in Call of Duty and I can order my Domino’s right there from the QR code that shows up for my local Domino’s. There are certainly people looking at it. As soon as one does it, they will take all the heat and then everybody else will start.

Q: Sony seems to be ahead in the console wars with Xbox now. They have quite a lead in terms of player numbers, and their brand is probably in a better place than Xbox. Would more aggressive monetisation torpedo that feel-good factor and give Microsoft a chance to get ahead?

Maybe. I doubt it. It is one of those things that happens in every market. It is like a speed bump. Somebody is going to hit it, and they are going to feel bad, and then they can fire somebody.

One person is a scapegoat and then all of a sudden it is like, I thought you got rid of these ads. No, we did not get rid of them. We just said they were bad. But they are still there. Okay, cool.

Q: We have seen the success of League of Legends with their show on Netflix, Fallout doing really well on Amazon Prime. Is Call of Duty an obvious IP to try and turn into a TV property?

Yeah. Who knows? There was always talk of that kind of stuff. Did Activision start an Activision Studios thing? They had a whole Hollywood group there and everything. I do not know what happened to them. That would certainly be an interesting look into what that looks like. But that was always talked about. No one had ever known what it was going to look like. I am sure somebody did somewhere, but I did not.

Each Call of Duty franchise can all be interesting in their own right. You can try and mix and match those. I think we did that in Vanguard, where we mixed World War II with the Black Ops side of things. There is a ton of potential. There are interesting characters and interesting things. You just have to do it right.

You cannot do Halo. Halo did not do well. Unfortunately, as soon as you pull his mask off, it leaves a lot of the flair. Fallout has done great. I love Fallout. Fallout is a very unique property in that sense. Same with League. They spent a ton on League. That show was great. I loved it.

The second season of Arcane was awesome. It is a lot of work. I remember when EA came out with Wing Commander in the movie. It was a terrible disaster. That was the one they actually produced themselves, which was interesting.

I am a huge Fallout fan. I love Fallout. We were able to work with them on Modern Warfare 3, and it was before the show was out. It was actually kind of hard to get buy-in that we should have these characters and stuff in the game. It did not get as fully featured as we had hoped, but it was still there and it was early. Now to see it come back in various forms, I am like, yeah, okay, that is cool. It is always nice to be ahead of your time.

Q:What if Todd Howard said, look Greg, we need to make the gunplay even better for Fallout 5. We made some strides in Fallout 4. What would you love to do with it? How would you change things?

I will be there tomorrow, Todd! I will be there tomorrow.

My God. It is terrible right now. Whatever you are doing, do not do what you are doing. There’s so many issues with the animations. Their engine is rough, especially in first person. I think they use the same models between first and third person. You have to dig in completely into what they are doing in first person. Their whole ADS thing, I think it was click to ADS. It was not a smooth dynamic transitional ADS.

The thing that kills me today is I still do not know how you would do VATS well, which is the tough part because I would want to do multiplayer in that environment. But if you are not doing multiplayer, it is fine. You could do some of it. But there is a ton of work there to do, even the animations and everything else. They are doing everything at such a large world scale, so that means your weapons and your items cannot be that great. They cannot be the stars of the show. If you are going to do a shooter, the weapons should be the main characters.

Q: You’ve got me thinking about some kind of arena shooter between someone specced up as a Brotherhood of Steel paladin versus the Enclave. That would be really cool.

Yeah, that would be awesome. You would have to see about the bullet sponge side of things and everything else. VATS helps with that in some instances, assuming you are doing single player. There is a lot of cool stuff you could do in there.

Q: Fallout obviously has some divisive shooting mechanics but could the same be said with Mass Effect too? Is that something BioWare need to look into?

Yeah, Mass Effect, same thing. I was disappointed every time I went to play Mass Effect. Same with Starfield. Starfield was like that. One day somebody will figure out how to license out some shooting mechanics to these games that really need it.

Q: Given the reaction of the UK’s advertising watchdog to an advert for Black Ops 7, do you think there will be a reaction to play it safe on marketing future Call of Duty titles or will games always take risks in their marketing?

Yes. It depends on how big the fine is. They are probably getting more marketing from that than from the actual piece itself.

It is probably not intentional. It is certainly not intentional knowing the history within the company. The edginess in general within marketing, that is their job. They are supposed to be edgy. Do not break any laws, or do not get fined more than we get on the other side of it. That is an interesting one.

This interview was also published on Strafe:
https://www.strafe.com/news/read/ex-cod-director-greg-reisdorf-pros-casuals-leaks-developer-ego/