Building Headquarters: The Social Hub in Call of Duty WWII

[Music] hey everyone my name is riley peach i am a systems designer at sledgehammer games and i am here to tell you about how easy it is to build a friendly third-person social space and a competitive first-person shooter it's not it's not uh on call of duty world war ii we wanted to build something that offered a lot of new social and creative outlets for players and we created headquarters is a large multiplayer social space that allows players to gear up check out various challenges test out their weapons play mini games and a whole lot more it's loosely themed around d-day plus three three days after the invasion of normandy and it's a military base where players can stay wrapped up in our game world while still interacting with core systems in a way it's an evolution of call of duty advanced warfare's virtual lobby a semi-interactive menu that let people

customize their characters and then show them off to people that they'll be in a match with and see what everyone else has equipped we had a lot of goals setting out what we wanted to offer players how we wanted to engender specific behavior and how we wanted to improve the typical player session we were successful in some ways unsuccessful in others and ultimately learned a lot along the way about how mostly non-combative features can resonate with a combat focused player base when done right we'll examine headquarters from a design perspective from start to finish what were our goals setting out how did we set out to achieve those goals and what were ultimately the results positive and negative on the final player experience in between we're going to take a close look at a system orders and contracts which is a familiar system with a bit of a spin and wrap things up with some final thoughts on headquarters as a whole we identified three goals from headquarters starting out although they formed a lot more over time first

improving the the core loop for players how a typical session would go second is adding social components to existing features familiar features to players and third expanding the types of players that play the game as well as the types of content that we can offer players who are already in it first and foremost we wanted to improve the the core player loop how people spend their sessions on a given day in previous releases players tended to follow a pretty standard path through a multi-player session they'd boot up the game they'd wait for some friends to get online hang out in menus and then go off into multiplayer matches and play a set of multiplayer matches and then they'd stop for a number of reasons they maybe got frustrated by a string of hard matches they ran out of different things to do and wanted to stop for the day uh or they um you know they had other obligations they had to run off somewhere else there's a lot of different reasons that might get them to stop and headquarters was something that

we built to insert new layers into that flow we wanted to get people to begin their session by setting new goals for the day than they had yesterday we wanted them to have their wait time be somewhere other than a menu we wanted to sprinkle headquarters visits in between individual matches and have players consume something other than the fast-paced gun play effectively bookending individual matches probably most importantly we wanted them to end the day differently did you hit a big progression goal well you should go and flaunt the rewards of that in front of other people in headquarters are you frustrated well go into headquarters and play some lighthearted minigames with various people that are hanging out there are you bored well now we have something to give you that's something different than fast-paced gunplay to spice up the experience and then allow you to re-enter multiplayer matches when you see fit later on we'll talk about how some of this worked and how some of it didn't impact the loop in ways that we had hoped our second and probably an obvious goal was to add social components to existing

features one of the better examples of this is prestige prestige and call of duty is a huge milestone for players something that they work countless hours toward and then when they achieve it it's something they're really really proud of and get to show off to their friends but it happens in a menu alone without very much fanfare so we decided to go all out and we we put a big cliff in the middle of headquarters that juts out into the playable space when you go and enter prestige planes fly by flares are going off there's a general saluting you so you can have your own lion king moment up on on this cliff in front of everybody else now we took something that was previously celebrated alone but now use it to drive interaction and increase investment for players other examples of things that we've taken that are existing features that we've made more social and public we have supply drops which can be opened in front of an audience we have items that can be worn in front of different players in this space you run around in and in world

leader boards that showcase your various multiplayer statistics all of this is in an effort to make headquarters deliver on an added level of recognition and immersion to the call of duty experience a lot of this had a new system intertwined into it called social score social score is a system we built that allowed players to positively reinforce one another and contribute to the community in order to get really exciting rewards to use in front uh using the rest of the game the goal was a system that allowed players to make more of their contributions to the community like handmade weapon paint jobs or custom emblems that they built with it came commending which is a way to give a player a one-time like that shows them that you like something they're doing or you had a fun mini game with them or you like something that they're showing off our final major goal was to expand the player archetypes that engaged with the game we sat down to assess how well our systems appeal to different kinds of

players call of duty being a competitive multiplayer game resonates really well with people who like that part of the experience so we in building headquarters we did want to cater to that type of player but really we wanted to open up the reward landscape for other player types there are a wealth of new opportunities to socialize catalog your various achievements explore a myriad of easter eggs and systems you may not be accustomed to and we hoped albeit we were unsure that the right incarnation of these systems would expand the palette of our core player type even a little bit in order to achieve these goals we held some rough philosophies about how we get there these weren't formal predetermined design colors but when we look back at the development we find that these were guiding our hand more than anything else first and probably our best guiding light was just embracing what players gravitated toward during play tests and experiments um if players did something that wasn't what we had in mind for headquarters

rather than say how do we get them back on track our approach was to say how do we build systems around this and foster that behavior and turn it into something that's even more engaging and more exciting for players a really good example of this was uh internally we we loved facing off one-on-one against one another and people took time uh after hours to build out small maps where we would face off one on one and have little mini tournaments within the studio and and for us that captured an excitement that we wanted to put into headquarters because in headquarters people kept trying to bring that into play tests so we built a pit on the the beach and headquarters that players can participate in and spectate one versus one matches this probably this this came out of what i think was one of the most impactful parts of our our development a game jam when you're working on a feature that thrives on spontaneous organic fun game jams have a unique ability to find immense potential within your systems that you weren't sure was there we structured

the game jam to be focused on headquarters and invited the team to contribute whatever they that they thought would be fun within the headquarters space one versus one was one one of many features that shipped after originating in the game jam another philosophy for us making this a low friction experience all around was key part of this was an effort to make headquarters a single button press away and be loaded in the background as often as possible some technical challenges prevented us from being able to fully commit to this particular point of low friction but the philosophy helped guide more than one system we didn't want players getting frustrated by long loads or cumbersome tasks in fact we didn't even want to make it required instead we wanted players to have an internal decision-making process of i could play without headquarters but i get more by doing it and i'm excited to go back when i have items or challenges to pick up there we tailored systems to be opt-in for

players to choose to do them in headquarters versus doing them within menus additionally we wanted to provide new ways for players to unveil and celebrate things that they unlock with people around them and use public supply drops to do this to make it even more social we give rewards for people opening drops in front of others and give people rewards for watching others open drops if you see something really rare come out there's even more rewards associated with that this is an active in in a way it's an act of generosity because you can open it in the menus or in headquarters and we found that even though you could do that for some small currencies or awards those sources of those rewards were never lucrative enough to beat out many other ways to get those things and yet when we look back on it we saw that many players still chose to do it in headquarters which led us to believe that the system itself was more engaging than doing it alone our final design pillar centers on friction as well creating a low barrier of entry for interacting with other players

we wanted any of our systems to not only promote interaction but make it as easy as possible interacting with a player is a simple task you can commit to an interaction and it lasts usually less than a minute you can have your microphone off you can have your microphone on you can decline it easily it's your choice we figure that by creating the most accessible system possible for interaction players can take it as far as they want and not be put off by headquarters as a whole because the interactions themselves are too daunting uh the biggest barriers for interacting are actually the moments leading up to the interaction itself hand-picking teammates sending messages or accepting party invites all of these are pretty no-brainer tasks when you're with friends but the moment that you're starting to consider them with strangers apprehension creeps in so we made all of that non-essential to interactions and headquarters nothing is binding but is instead more like an icebreaker we did this with a few key decisions in implementation the menu you bring up

to interact with the player is both semi-transparent and not full screen so it never feels like you're leaving the world to do it all of the interactions themselves can be abandoned at any point and can often be done while cued for a match so you never feel like you're really committed to the activity or can't back out there's no punishment for engaging with these things and the benefits are generally not enticing enough to make it feel high stakes you can see that things in this menu are only a button press away we have you know you can commend a player with a button you can challenge them to a shootout you can check out the gear they have hopefully with the lowest barrier possible to doing these things during development we ran into a pretty crucial issue that we had trouble addressing for a while how do we meaningfully disrupt how people view a session of call of duty our goal wasn't to replace the core multiplayer experience instead we wanted to supplement it and create a variety that turned into a loop of entering

headquarters grabbing various things going into core multiplayer matches going back into headquarters and so on in short we wanted players to develop a routine in and interacting with headquarters with some unpredictable surprises mixed throughout their session so we built orders and contracts challenges that are available to players on a schedule with a range of difficulty time investment and associated rewards some of them can take a while to complete and rewards can range from small amounts of currencies to unique rare rewards contracts only differ from orders in that they have a cost to activate them and a time frame to complete them by making them a high-risk high-reward version of them the system goal is to achieve a better symbiosis of headquarters and core multiplayer we started by making it part of the tutorial for headquarters so that when players first started the game they'd be

in headquarters they'd pick up a new player friendly challenge they'd go off into their first match and then they'd come back to the lobby for the only time we do this we pull them out of that lobby and show them how to redeem the rewards and pick up new ones we also kept notifications on the menu level and in world to make sure that this process was ingrained in players we also purposely built the the inventory size and order availability such that players would have to return once or twice a day to headquarters to get more our biggest hope with this was that organic exposure to things happening in headquarters as they made the walk to pick up orders would be exciting and fun it was never intended to be cumbersome the load is pretty short the distance is small and the density of players and activity is high instead we wanted this short trip to headquarters to be a welcome break for players throughout their session on top of that building a limited size inventory actually allows for a little bit of fun and creative efficiency if you for instance have a

multi-kill challenge pairing that up with a challenge to play in a mode with a lot of player density can be a fun and smart decision for players to make this section's gonna kick off a full retrospective on headquarters what design aspirations panned out what fell flat and a lot of what went wrong along the way and we'll start with orders and contracts orders and contracts were probably one of our more successful systems in the game we saw notable upticks in engagement numbers with the modes that they sent players toward they also led to a ton of community activity people posting on a daily basis what the orders were discussions and very often rants about the challenges associated with those rewards frenzy over unique rewards showing up uh for the first time when we had new downloadable content come out new orders would drive people to that new content allow them to find it more easily and experience the new maps or new items

and give them a challenge based path to unlock all those things a recent study of the system even showed that players who got orders that lined up nicely with their favorite modes got them even more engaged playing more and interacting with the system more the rewards for our orders are typically supply drops or in-game currencies which means that we have a limitless and more importantly scalable set of rewards to give them so when we make a really fun but challenging order or contract we can scale the rewards to match from a standpoint of overall game health orders and contracts were a success typically with especially with regards to how they integrated headquarters into the core multiplayer experience but where they fell flat was directly related to headquarters and issues that affected it starting with launch that's where we'll start looking back at the feature as a whole our biggest hurdle happened at launch a

few issues born out of the ambition of the design led to a launch for headquarters that took months to react to and recover from the plan from the start was simple on paper headquarters is only a button press away when you're not in a match it would always be loaded in the background when you're not in that match you'd be in the menus or in a lobby and you'd press start and the ui would fade away and you'd be standing in headquarters in practice what it took to accomplish this cascaded into issues that forced us to turn headquarters into a solo experience for a while as you can imagine when getting players to learn the ropes of and grow fond of a brand new social space the flipping the switch to turn that into a solo experience is not a good easy or desirable process over time this painted headquarters as a secondary experience despite it being a huge priority for us to fix ultimately we turned things back on uh and it just didn't come with the fanfare that we had hoped with launch the biggest fallout of this was that we

had to abandon some of our zero friction one button press away you know goal that we had set for headquarters this was part of guaranteeing stability and a more streamlined multiplayer experience so in the end it's good but as a result some items ended up in menus like orders and contracts that driving force that kept people coming back and forth between headquarters and uh core multiplayer it's still available in headquarters but it gave players another option that sort of took away from that loop experience that we had hoped it all sounds like doom and gloom but once headquarters was back up and running sentiment climbed and we got to see the results of our design intent across the board the various mini-games and micro interactions that we had throughout the space were received with mixed results initially they created a lot of intrigue and variety for players we saw a lot of people going out of their way to interact with strangers which made us think that our low barrier to interactivity was working out really

well over time though the the engagement with them dwindle a little bit and we suspect for two reasons one we didn't add a lot of content into these existing mini games after launch so it might have grown a little bit stale for some players but the second one which is probably more important is that we didn't uh you know we we deliberately didn't build out really meaningful reward structures around these mini-games as we talked about earlier we didn't want it to be high stakes so we didn't associate big rewards with them as a result you have a fun thing here in headquarters but then you have another fun thing here somewhere else that has way more rewards associated with it and players often chose the latter over time if we were to explore these kinds of interactions again we'd certainly stick to the low barrier of entry and the casual nature of them but work toward building out enticing reward structures or shareable social challenges striking that balance is really tough though keeping

activities light-hearted and friendly but also substantive in rewards is tricky if the players have are being faced off against one another cooperative activities and anonymized competitive activities might be a safer route toward trying to check both of those boxes that said they were pretty quick to develop and they offered variety which is what we wanted many games like one versus one are not meant to dethrone core multiplayer or team deathmatch but to offer alternatives it's hard to assess the targeted success of minigames beyond the fact that people still engage with them to this day and it keeps those parts of headquarters that they live in lively additionally one versus one resonated really well with pros and streamers alike because it gave them an opportunity to invite fans into a more intimate setting within headquarters the visibility of that is really hard to measure user-generated media this is a big

success for us which ties into our earlier goal of expanding player archetypes it's just how much varied online content media headquarters was able to generate a lot of great online content we typically see is surrounding the the core multiplayer experience but headquarters added something new into the mix it fastly expanded the types of content we saw lots of tutorial videos showing off how to find our many hidden easter eggs videos showcasing explaining the feature screenshots of friendly messages between players which very hard to come by sometimes and suggestions of more non-combat features i'm personally the most happy about this positive seeing people find new ways and to get excited about and share their experiences was a huge goal and in that regard the feature exceeded expectations another part of our design for headquarters was tailored toward flexibility something many online games and games as a service do these days we used headquarters to envelop players

in the spirit of the content patch or or holiday or season or you know component of the war that we really wanted to highlight at the time themes for the game take over and it goes in hand in hand with the maps and items that we're releasing at the same time headquarters becomes this living breathing space to convey those themes in a way that feels grounded within the game world during our winter siege event for instance we have holiday themed decorations warm soup stations and cozy fires scattered throughout the space to help reinforce the delivery of all the other cool content that comes with that patch as you can imagine there are some unexpected results that come with building a space like this going back to social score we projected that it would take players roughly six months to get to the end of social score progression because we wanted to be a really rare thing at the end of that progression you get kind of an elite name tag as a player

and get to show that off to other other people around you and we wanted to be a big thing for people to get excited about but a few players and you know it's supposed to be rare a few players got it in about a month uh six times faster than we had anticipated uh so we had to look at uh how and why and what they did to pull that off so it turns out that they combined a lot of our systems in really creative ways first they performed really well in core multiplayer matches really well they would come into headquarters and as a result they would be at the top of the leaderboards part of that means you get to show off your custom created emblem and they would make that emblem say things like commend me i commend back or commend me for free loot which is not a service we offer um they did a lot of things like that to get people in and they would do emotes in front of them and people would come up and commend them turns out the players that got it that quickly were commended by over 10 000 unique players in the span

of about a month or two which is astonishing to us and it's not a kind of behavior we expected but it was great to see players dedicated to achievements and social status in the same way that others might cherish or show off their kill death ratio or other core multiplayer statistic we also had um players create and name commend day the day in the week that we put up an order to go around and commend people and you see a bunch of people hanging out in headquarters running around commending one another and having online discussion about it which we're happy to see i can't speak toward future plans but as a member of the design team behind this feature we are really proud to see it come to life in the way that it did building headquarters led to a vast spectrum of feedback and impressions on one hand beyond the shaky start we heard a lot of things like you should have spent more time building feature x y or z and core multiplayer

but on the other we heard a lot of people saying i love that there are things for me to do in multiplayer outside of the fast gun play and the passively positive implications of people taking videos of memorable moments with strangers or positive community interactions hq was a daunting ambition for call of duty world war ii and as a game designer i i think it's a healthy aspiration to create content that appeals to the widest variety of interests our pillars embracing unexpected fun low friction access and a low barrier to interactivity are all the same principles that i would use to build a feature like this again but i believe there's plenty of room to re to reflect on what could be focused and refined for a more targeted experience that still delivers a rich social atmosphere in part that would be expanding on the social components of familiar features like prestige ranking up showing off gear i think we could have intertwined systems like social score and commendations more fluidly into core

multiplayer so people saw the relationship between the spaces better there are also a number of questions and lessons surrounding what kind of player density is required to achieve a space that has organic fun moments occur player count alone does not beget activity or density but it's a factor that you balance alongside your level design and your matchmaking systems because both of those need to keep people active and interacting with one another for instance we built our levels such that all the essential features were clustered in one area so you could get to them quickly in between matches turns out the other parts of the space are less lively as a result because the essential features are in the other parts of headquarters lastly it's okay for some features to be in menus just because you have a cool space to ground things in doesn't mean that that's necessarily the right call for any feature things can be accessible in both and it still allows for this space a space like this to shine

there were a lot of lessons learned in building headquarters it's hard if not impossible to have binary answers to questions like do social spaces always make games better given that you don't often have a strong comparison point and they're never intended to dethrone things like core multiplayer but to supplement and support those features headquarters made call of duty world war ii different and helped cast the experience in a new light for players old and new thank you so much for your time i'd like to thank the rest of the team on headquarters who put a lot of hard work and passion toward building this feature and helped create the insight and lessons shared today i'd also like to thank dan kendall at sledgehammer who helped create this presentation if you have any questions i think we might be able to hang out here for a bit since we're rolling into lunch here thank you