Call of Duty: Warzone was originally designed with 200 players in mind

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Infinity Ward "compromised" to knock the player count down to 150

Warzone
(Image credit: Activision)

Call of Duty: Warzone was originally designed for 200 players, a new interview has revealed.

This interview comes from The Washington Post, and discusses Call of Duty: Warzone's origins with a number of lead developers at original studio Infinity Ward. Development lead Patrick Kelly started out by explaining that "you want the world to have the graphical fidelity and realism of the best parts of the rest of your game. But at the end of the day... there’s only so small a footprint you can get this content down to. And you get into this question of like, how many frickin’ gigabytes is this thing going to be?"

Kelly goes on to explain that the developers "compromised," cutting the player count from 200 down to 150 in an effort to make the game easier to playtest in particular. "Even then, playtesting Warzone proved particularly challenging," the developer continued. "Not only did they need to recruit 100 to 150 players for each test, but Kelly and [Dave] Stohl discovered they needed a diversity to the lobbies as well."

The original Warzone development lead rounds out by explaining that Infinity Ward's track record developing Call of Duty games meant its employees had spent years playing the shooter series. Because of this, Kelly and Stohl were worried that the results from playtesting would be skewed due to the high skill level of the majority of playtesters at Infinity Ward.

It's a neat look behind the scenes at Call of Duty: Warzone's development period, and we'd highly recommend reading over the full interview from The Washington Post. Elsewhere in the interview, Kelly reveals that Infinity Ward has at least several more years of content planned for the battle royale game.

Right now though, Season 3 of Warzone is right around the corner from launching, with a special live event beginning today at approximately 12 p.m. PT/3 p.m. ET. Many expect this will spell the end for the current Verdansk map in a nuclear attack of some form, but in the meantime, Warzone's menus have already been updated to reflect the incoming Season 3 content drop, planned to launch later this week in full.

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Hirun Cryer
Hirun Cryer

Hirun Cryer is a freelance reporter and writer with Gamesradar+ based out of U.K. After earning a degree in American History specializing in journalism, cinema, literature, and history, he stepped into the games writing world, with a focus on shooters, indie games, and RPGs, and has since been the recipient of the MCV 30 Under 30 award for 2021. In his spare time he freelances with other outlets around the industry, practices Japanese, and enjoys contemporary manga and anime.