Call of Duty Warzone's new creative director comes straight from Far Cry 6

Call of Duty Warzone has a new creative director, and he's coming straight over from helping to lead Far Cry 6 as game director.

Ted Timmins announced his new role on his personal Twitter account, saying he officially joined the team at Warzone studio Raven Software today. Timmins announced his departure from Ubisoft in June, saying his role had come to a natural end as work on Far Cry 6 wraps up ahead of its upcoming October 7 release date. Timmins' previous credits before joining Ubisoft include design work on Sea of Thieves at Rare and serving as lead designer on Fable: Anniversary at Lionhead.

I’m so excited to announce that today I joined the team at Raven as a Creative Director on Call of Duty: Warzone! I’m delighted to join the team, on a game I absolutely love. It’s a huge honour, privilege and opportunity and I’m excited to get started and meet the team (soon) 🇺🇸 pic.twitter.com/7CoX0INUufJuly 12, 2021

Normally it would be a little unusual for a Call of Duty game to bring in a new creative director more than a year after it launched, but Warzone is breaking all kinds of new ground for the franchise as an active (and massively popular) live service game. It's tough to say where Timmins might help to steer the ship next, but is it too much to hope for a new pirate ship mode? OK, yeah, that's probably too much to hope for.

Warzone is in the middle of a season right now, but the latest Black Ops: Cold War season 4 roadmap proves it's still making moves, with a new mode called Payload finally arriving after first being teased more than a month ago. A new type of progression event called Blueprint Blitz gives players the chance to earn weapon blueprints from previous seasons, with Contraband Contracts coming into play after you complete two standard Contracts.

Granted, there are still rough spots to smooth over: it looks like a new glitch is letting Warzone players jump into the gulag early while invincible, and Activision is going after social media accounts that promote exploits that use machine learning to evade typical cheat countermeasures.