News - Developer Explains Why Dmz Isn. T Being Supported Mw3
Unfortunately, my friends, this is the end of the road for DMZ. In this article, I'm going to tell you exactly why DMZ is not going to be supported in Modern Warfare 3, but also why I'm holding out a tiny bit of hope for its future. Over the last few weeks, there's been a lot of rumblings and confusion in the Cod community around the future of DMZ, and honestly, I'm not surprised.
After this extremely confusing and, in my opinion, misleading statement from Activision, the future of DMZ has never felt so unclear. Well, until we heard this from geeky pastimes at COD next, so DMZ T Bisco, they've said it is. As far as I spoke to the creative director of Raven about it, I asked, and he said, as far as he knows, Raven has nothing to do with DMZ.
DMZ is staying tied to Modern Warfare 2, so there is nothing new, no new movement, no new guns, and no new perk system. None of that stuff is coming to the DMZ. DMZ will stay as it is now in World War 2. Things are not looking good, but this isn't the end of the story. As someone who has spent the last 10 to 15 years developing and delivering software projects.
I wanted to give you some insight as to why DMZ is potentially very difficult to support going forward and likely the reason that it isn't going to happen. I'm going to jump straight into the meat of it, but before I do, I want to caveat what I'm about to tell you by saying this is a massive oversimplification.
On a very complex topic, this is purely for the purpose of helping other people understand what is likely going on behind the scenes at the development studios. For the game that we all know and have come to love. All right, so let's say we have our game. In this instance, we're talking about Call of Duty.
The launcher that you open up contains Warzone, DMZ, and multiplayer. To keep it simple, it's probably also worth saying that what I'm about to describe is being tailored completely to this situation that we're in now with War Zone, a game that, from what I can tell, was designed to last at least two cod cycles.
Okay, so during the development of any game, a studio will create many builds or versions of this code base, and when they're ready to release it, it's hopefully tested and made available for download. Obviously, there is a lot more that goes into releasing a software project, but for simplicity sake, let's say we have our build and we're going to call it version one.
This is then the version of the game that you play and enjoy until you start sending angry tweets to Activision about the broken weapons or holes in the map that you fell through while trying to clutch up. This is the point where we'd hope to see an update or release. These releases can come in small versions like bug fixes or slightly bigger versions, like ones we'd see along with a new season or map release, and this is all well and good for the most part.
The developers will tick along like this until it's time to start work on the next year's code, but this is where it gets a little bit more complicated: allowing the next studio to come along and start working on the next big release, in this case, modern Warfare 3 War Zone and zombies. Sledgehammer Raven and Treyarch need to take a snapshot, sometimes called a tag of the code base; this is where they're going to make their changes, and often it's in the form of a new branch of code.
Sound good, good. Now before we go any further down this road, let's take a second to look at what we know about Modern Warfare 3 and War Zone so far. We know that it's going to be built using the same engine as Modern Warfare 2 and War Zone, but we also know that the big map of Al Mazra currently being used for War Zone and DMZ is also being removed.
This is important, so remember it. Later, on this new branch. Raven and the rest of the studios need to get to work ripping out all the graphical assets code and configuration associated with Al Mazra, along with updating any code, adding new features, and ultimately making an attempt at creating the War Zone 2 that we should have started with last year, but that's not all this year; we have Treyarch in the mix.
These guys are responsible for building the brand new Zombies mode, and from what we've seen so far, this mode has been built using DMZ as a starting point. If not built on top of DMZ itself, there are naturally a lot more intricacies to this process, but they're smart people; they know what they're doing.
As time goes on and more changes are made, we start to see a bigger gap. There are more differences between the new version of the code and the version that we're playing on currently, not to mention all the updates that are happening on the existing line of code in the live game. As you might have started to notice, this stuff isn't easy; it's November.
It's time for Modern Warfare 3 to launch, but we have a problem. We need to ensure that all the updates that happened this year to Modern Warfare 2's version of War Zone things that are going to carry forward, like weapons, etc., make it into the new version of the game before it's released. But by doing this year's Modern Warfare 2's version of War Zone, things that are going to carry forward, like weapons, etc., make it into the new version of the game before it's released.
But by doing this, we also need to make sure that we don't break anything in the new game or, worse, override it. This is where regressions happen. This leaves DMZ in a pretty bad spot, but we know the new game has had its big map updated and has been replaced by the new map, Zakhan. We also know that the DMZ code base has potentially been overwritten with the changes necessary to make DM zombies.
If this is the case, then it will make it impossible to merge DMZ as we know it into Modern Warfare 3, but if it's not, then there's no reason that Modern Warfare 3 can't include DMZ as we know it on the brand new map, but that doesn't line up with what we've been told is coming next, so what happens now?
We kind of already have confirmation of what's happening next. The plan so far seems to be that the new version of War Zone will be released in December. This is going to include the Modern Warfare 3 integration, the big map, the updated version of War Zone, and this brand new DM Zombies mode. We've also been told that the existing DMZ mode will remain in Modern Warfare 2.
This might even include its own launcher; it's supposedly going to be receiving some quality life updates and maybe some new missions if we're lucky, but at this moment in time, this is looking like the best-case scenario, but Z. I've just listened to your waffle for ages. You said there was hope.
