Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare director came up with Private Military Companies because he wanted to stop making real-life countries the enemy for his own security: "I don't want to have this problem anymore"

Former Call of Duty director Glen Schofield decided to stop centering the series' antagonists around real-life countries partly for his own security.

Schofield's long and storied game development career includes co-founding Sledgehammer Games and, under the Activision umbrella, co-directing 2011's, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3, 2014's Advanced Warfare, and 2017's WWII.

While they existed in prior entries, Advanced Warfare made Private Military Companies the primary antagonists of the game as an alternative to armed forces inspired by real-world countries, and it turns out there's a very pragmatic reason behind that: Schofield's safety.

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Talking to PC Gamer, Schofield recalled a dinner he shared with journalists while doing press for Modern Warfare 3, which is all about an ultranationalist terrorist who usurps control of the Russian government and invades Europe, and his decision to turn down a press trip to Russia out of safety concerns.

"I was doing 30 days of press for Modern Warfare 3," he said. "I'm all over the world, and the last stop is in the UK, and I'm having dinner with some journalists from the UK and I get a call. They say, 'We need you to go to Russia tomorrow and do some more press.' And by then, I was really tired. I'm like, 'Do you know who the enemies are in Modern Warfare 3?'. They're like, 'Don't worry, we'll have a bodyguard with you.' And I'm like, 'I don't feel any better.' And so I was a little worried about that aspect. And so I didn't go."

Schofield remembers immediately going back to his dinner party and telling them directly, "'OK, you know what, my next game is not going to have a country as the enemy. Because I want to go to those countries.'"

Despite Schofield having long since left Activision and explored vastly different ventures (he most recently directed The Callisto Protocol and then left developer Striking Distance), not to mention Call of Duty fully re-embracing real-world global conflict, the series' history was forever altered by Schofield realizing simply, 'Yeah, I'm going to do that, because I don't want to have this problem anymore.' And that's how the PMC started."

Schofield related to PC Gamer that his proximity to an Iraqi refugee during grad school, whose uncle refused to leave the country despite threats from then-president Saddam Hussein, also helped inform his more sensitive approach to geopolitical strife in games.

His relationship with his cohort ultimately inspired Schofield to ask then-Activision president Eric Hirshberg to write a speech to be delivered by Advanced Warfare villain Jonathan Irons, which did make it into the game.

PMCs or not, here are the best Call of Duty games you can play today.