There will be at least 20 "drops" of new content for Modern Warfare 3, as a nine-month season of expansions to last year's big game kicks off this month.
The makers of the first-person shooter juggernaut are promising a season of new content, starting with the Xbox 360-first release on January 24 of the first two drops, a pair of multiplayer maps and stretching. The season will continue with at least a drop a month through September.
Three development studios are working on these expansions, which will turn Modern Warfare 3 into a year-long affair. The extended support for the November 2011 game will comprise "more post-launch support than we've ever done before," according to Robert Bowling, creative strategist of Infinity Ward, the long-time Call of Duty studio that co-developed Modern Warfare 3. The downloadable content is being made by Infinity Ward, MW3's other main studio Sledgehammer Games and the veteran shooter specialists at Raven Software.
The first two drops are maps called Piazza and Liberation, both playable in competitive and the co-op Special Ops modes. Multiplayer maps are the norm for Modern Warfare/Call of Duty downloadable content. But for this game, Bowling signals that players will get some surprises.
"We want to do more than just traditional multiplayer maps," Bowling said. "We want to do Special Ops missions, new game modes as well as experiment with things we've never tried to do before." Campaign DLC and new weapons are, like anything else "on the table," he said. "We'll go with whatever works, whatever's the most fun." One of the only restrictions, he said, is that new content has to fit into the Modern Warfare 3 universe.
The season runs through September, though there's not necessarily a big booming season finale planned. "We'll see," Bowling laughed. And why end it at nine months? Presumably it's to clear the way for the next Call of Duty game, likely coming from Call of Duty: Black Ops developer Treyarch in November. From Bowling's perspective: "That's just the development schedule that's working for the amount of content that we want to do right now. We want to focus on: 'What do we have the ability to do? What does our realistic development schedule look like without impacting when we have to work on other stuff and when we have to pulling people into other projects."
Call of Duty: Elite subscriptions cost $50 a year. Subscribers get all of Modern Warfare 3's DLC as part of that deal. Everyone else can pay a la carte. But could some of these drops be free? "We'll see," Bowling said. "I cannot announce anything yet."