Over the past 3 years, seniors, directors, and ex-TV veterans have been hired into Infinity Ward’s UI/UX department, despite the expansion of the team and its talent throughout development, it has left Call of Duty players lost in navigating the dark Modern Warfare 2’s UI and UX systems; a confusing mess that contrasts with the intuitive menu designs established by previous Call of Duty titles. User Interface (UI) and User Experience (UX) play an important role in the overall gameplay and execution as it serves as a great tool to control the quality of a product. However, due to some internal differences between the sections, which complicates the instructions and workflows, it has produced the results that many players are seeing now. The issue was pressed internally for discussion and a few points were raised ahead of release describing the UI as “cumbersome and intrusive to the design goals” – the UI tends to directly impact gameplay and without an emphasis on specific features, it can or break the player experience.
Call of Duty interface overhaul
With the introduction of Warzone and Call of Duty: Mobile, it showed a slight shift towards Activision’s desire to revamp Call of Duty’s interfaces to a more modern, streamlined screen for discovering and saving content. Infinity Ward plans to facilitate and completely rework Call of Duty’s UI/UX system. “A major redesign and rebrand” ⁃ Launch of the first Call of Duty subscription program ⁃ Introducing the mobile app, in the Concept⁃ Content Discovery & Library/Re-architecture Store pic.twitter.com/rwmZ13iZhS — Ralph (@RalphsValve) February 9, 2022 They sought out this talent and opened hundreds of UI/UX/Engineering positions for hire, bringing in wizards from Hulu and Microsoft. Design refreshes are always polarizing and complicated, as generally, the UI/UX team is a forum for many other large departments including Art, Design, QA, Marketing and more. The results mainly boil down to time, coordination and working from home. In conversation with a contributor, it was mentioned that some UI/UX overhaul is coming for the future of Modern Warfare 2 and Warzone 2.0, “It’s a work in progress, there are a lot of moving pieces […] updates have started well.” Ostensibly, a more piecemeal approach to improving UI/UX incrementally rather than at launch. Many departments continue to work collaboratively to improve the UI and other additional interfaces for Season 1 and beyond.
