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Activision Pays $42 Million to Infinity Ward Employee Group

admin — Thu, 17 May 2012 02:38:00 +0000

Activision’s legal battle with former Infinity Ward leads Jason West and Vince Zampella has taken the spotlight, but that is not the only legal battle with former Infinity Ward employees that Activision is going through.

Activision is also being sued by the “Infinity Ward Employee Group” for unpaid royalties and bonuses for their work on Modern Warfare 2. The group was asking for between $75 and $125 million in unpaid wages, in addition to up to $500 million in punitive damages.

Today, there are reports that Activision agreed to pay $42 million to the group’s lawyers after its discovery phase determined that the Infinity Ward Employee Group members were not implicated in its own lawsuit against West and Zampella over breach-of-contract.

“I can confirm for you that it happened today,” Bruce Isaacs, attorney for the Infinity Ward Employee Group, told Polygon. “I can also tell you that although it is a meaningful payment it is only a small portion of what we are seeking in litigation. It is outrageous that they made us wait, they obviously knew they owed the money and this just shows that they breached the contract.”

The Infinity Ward Employee Group and its lawyers still plan to pursue the full amount they are asking for from Activision.

Robert Bowling, Call of Duty Creative Strategist, Leaves Activision

admin — Tue, 27 Mar 2012 01:44:14 +0000

Robert Bowling, creative strategist for the Call of Duty franchise and the face of Infinity Ward, announced today that he will be departing from Infinity Ward and Activision.

“Today, I resign from my position as Creative Strategist of Call of Duty, as a lead of Infinity Ward, and as an employee of Activision,” Bowling wrote in a tweet earlier today.

Since Call of Duty 4, Bowling has more or less been the face of Infinity Ward’s titles, especially after the departure of founders Jason West and Vince Zampella, so his sudden departure comes as a bit of a surprise. Bowling did not offer a reason for his departure, either, so all we can do is guess at why he is moving on.

Shortly after Bowling made the announcement, Activision sent out an official statement on the departure to press outlets, but the statement does not shed on any light as to why Bowling is leaving.

Here is what Activision had to say: “We sincerely thank Robert for his many years of service. He’s been a trusted and valued member of the Infinity Ward team. We wish him all the best on his decision to pursue future opportunities.”

We here at team bRos think that there are a numerous amount of reasons why he would have left, especially because he tweeted the following in reply to someone:

“@deantak It’s the year of change Dean. Big budgets are no longer necessary for amazing gameplay experiences. Time to reconnect to our roots.”

This makes us think that he could have left for any of the following reasons:

What the Call of Duty franchise has become, and not so much what it use to be. Especially when it comes to creating the “same” game every year (2 different developers) and milking money from all the paying customers when it comes to map packs and much more.
Creative differences.
The numerous issues with the game; bugs, glitches, weapon issues, network code and much more. though I doubt he cared much about these.
The numerous issues with the Elite service and more especially the website and features such as clan operations taking months (too long) to launch.

Whatever the reasons may be, we at least thank him for his hard work at the times which he did so while at Infinity Ward and for the Call of Duty franchise fans. We wish him the best for his future.

Modern Warfare 3 Overwatch Map Released

admin — Wed, 22 Feb 2012 06:01:20 +0000

Infinity Ward and Sledgehammer Games have released another map called Overwatch apart of its content drop. You can download this map now on Xbox Live if you are an Elite subscriber only right now.

Modern Warfare 3 Improved Spawn Logic tonight

admin — Fri, 06 Jan 2012 04:39:43 +0000

Robert Bowling has informed us on Twitter that Modern Warfare 3 will be getting an update to its spawn logic system tonight at 2AM PST/4AM CST/5AM EST on January 6th, 2012. This will improve when, where and how you spawn so “Goodbye revenge spawns” as Robert Bowling says.

Source: Robert Bowling’s Twitter

MW3: The Vet and the n00b Trash Talk Video

admin — Thu, 01 Dec 2011 05:28:46 +0000

Modern Warfare 3 allows Updates without Patches

admin — Mon, 19 Sep 2011 00:34:05 +0000

Nearly every game released has bugs, and these bugs are often fixed with patches released after the game has been sold to millions of people. Online games are especially prone to this due the huge number of players discovering tactics and tricks that can be considered overpowered and, subsequently, leads to copious amounts of whining. Modern Warfare 3 is going to have updates without patches.

Executive producer Mark Rubin said:

“One of the big things we’ve changed is the ability to alter the game post-launch. That doesn’t sound like a cool feature, it sounds simple – it’s like ‘why can’t you just release patches?’ Well, games don’t work that way – you can patch some things, but for others, it’s a significant deal, patching is not broad enough to do everything in the game, So one behind-the-scenes feature allows us to update files, sometimes without even doing a full patch – we can just tweak things like weapon balance, which we could never do before. In the past, we’d put out a game and realize, ‘hmm, that’s weapon’s really over-powered’ but there was nothing we could do about it.

“With twenty million people playing the game, you learn more in the ten minutes after release than you do in months of pre-launch playtesting. So that tech feature was a big thing for us.”

He also talked about fighting back against hackers and cheaters who ruin the game for everyone else to the point they deserve to be stripped of their human rights.

“Security was a big problem in previous games, so we’ve done a whole lot on that to create what we hope is a much more secure game. Part of that is learning from Treyarch’s work on Black Ops and being pro-active and aggressive on banning, watching the leader boards, looking for cheaters.”

Being able to tweak things remotely without a patch has several upsides. If a weapon is far too unbalanced, it can be changed on the fly and affect everyone right away, making it easy to keep the details in check. Having to download a huge patch in order to rebalance a few weapons is incredibly annoying and one of the reasons I quit League of Legends. It does not take a 60mb patch to nerf Vayne.

Preparation like this saves time for both developers and the gamers, resulting in an all-round better experience. Modern Warfare 2 was given masses of criticism from gamers and reviewers for the massive amounts of cheating and the time it took to correct the errors.

Modern Warfare 3 Spec Ops Details

admin — Mon, 30 May 2011 01:36:23 +0000

A new set of details have been revealed for the Spec Ops mode in Infinity Ward and Sledgehammer’s upcoming first-person shooter, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3.

A favorite from Modern Warfare 2, Spec Ops is a co-operative mode set around various missions with various objectives. In Modern Warfare 3, Spec Ops will sport a new ranking system, an online matchmaking system and leaderboards. As well as Spec Ops, MW3 will feature a new Survival Mode, based around the game’s multiplayer maps.

One of the game’s Survival Mode maps, “Dome”, was detailed. It seems like a standard survival mode affair, with players starting out fighting against unlimited waves of soldiers, with some attack dogs, suicide dogs, kamikaze soldiers and juggernauts thrown into the mix as rounds progress.

Sledgehammer and Infinity Ward hope it will entice new players to move on form the single-player mode into the game’s robust multiplayer modes, while providing something that hardcore fans of the previous games will love.

All that stuff really fleshes out Spec Ops and adds in a lot that we know our fans are going to love, some of the most addictive aspects of Multiplayer. – Robert Bowling, Infinity Ward’s creative strategist.

There’s such hard-core players out there in the online community and you hear all the stories about the eight-year-olds, 12-year-olds and 13-year-olds swearing and ruining the experience. With Spec Ops, you can really get in there and hone your skills in a more confined environment. I think it’s a little more of an easy entry. I don’t have as much time as I did when I was 20 to be honing my twitch skills, but this certainly gives me a venue to experiment. – Sledgehammer’s Michael Condrey.

Modern Warfare 3 pre-order available at Amazon

admin — Mon, 16 May 2011 14:20:23 +0000

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 has been made available for pre-order over at Amazon.com.

The game doesn’t release until November 8th, 2011.

If you have not already checked out the Modern Warfare 3 Video Teaser, then make sure to so at the post below.

We will continue to have more Modern Warfare 3 information as it becomes available. So feel free to subscribe to our RSS feed or visit our site daily or weekly.

Modern Warfare 3 “America Under Siege” Teaser

admin — Sat, 14 May 2011 01:40:36 +0000

Take a look at the first Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 Teaser “American Under Siege.”

How good do you think Modern Warfare 3 will be? Will multiplayer even be worth playing this time around? Only time will tell leading onto it’s November 8th, 2011 release date.

For those wondering, Modern Warfare 3 will take place where Modern Warfare 2 ended. As months ago it was mentioned, Infinity Ward is working on this game with all new employees along with 2 additional developers, Sledgehammer Games and Raven Software.

It’s single player will feature about 15 missions, starting with the invasion in Manhattan by Russian force and ended in a final battle in Dubai. I hope the battle in Dubai will be awesome.

In addition to the game obviously having multiplayer, it will also feature 2 additional Spec Ops modes called “Survival” and “Mission.”

Modern Warfare 3 Teaser Site Opens

admin — Mon, 28 Feb 2011 03:10:18 +0000

Activision has launched a teaser site called http://findmakarov.com for Modern Warfare 3. As of this post, there is 2 days and some hours left before the teaser is revealed to us.

Update: Here it is!

IGN.com