When lockdown began, she realised that the future of her involvement was uncertain. Actor Lily Cowles, who plays MI6 agent Helen Park, had been part of those shoots, but still had plenty of work left to do. We can rearrange our lives to have meetings and figure out how to stream stuff, but to get actors to come in, I thought ‘This is going to be impossible’.”Īt that stage of development, several scenes from the campaign had already been performance-captured on a soundstage in Los Angeles. “I was confused because that was external to us. “Mo-cap and VO is somewhere where I thought we were dead in the water,” Vondrak says. But Vondrak quickly realised there was one department that was going to suffer.
For many roles in game development, this is inconvenient but not impossible writing, coding, designing, and art can all be performed remotely. And it kept snowballing to where I'm already thinking, well, if it goes longer than eight or 10 weeks, how can we possibly get everything done we needed to get done?”Ĭall of Duty’s publisher, Activision, mandated that all employees work from home until further notice. “And then all of a sudden it's the whole studio. “When this started to happen, we were like ‘Well, I guess half the studio maybe needs to work from home for two weeks’,” recalls Dan Vondrak, Senior Creative Director at Raven Software. But as lockdown began, it became clear that development of Black Ops Cold War was about to become significantly more difficult. Development had been going well, and the game was on-course for the classic Call of Duty November release window. Naturally, this means the 1980s-set single player campaign is a massive deal for the team working on it, and COVID-19 threatened their first time in the spotlight.īefore quarantine measures were enforced, the studio had been working on the game for months it had started production on the majority of the main missions, and had begun to lay the creative foundations for the side missions.
This is the inside story of how a triple-A video game was made from home during a pandemic.īlack Ops Cold War is the first Call of Duty game that Raven Software has been a lead developer on the company has traditionally been a support studio for the series.
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