The last time Call of Duty attempted an extraction shooter, we were living in a world without Arc Raiders in it. The DMZ beta that came with 2022’s Modern Warfare 2 was a valiant first draft, but one that ultimately failed to hook a sizable player base with its shoot, loot, and extract loop. Now the genre’s outlook is seemingly very different, with a boom in player interest thanks to the initial success of Embark Studios’ sci-fi shooter at the back end of 2025. With its popularity not quite where it was some months ago, the jury remains out on whether extraction shooters will ever be able to topple the battle royale anytime soon, if ever. But Infinity Ward is willing to try to find that out for itself with Modern Warfare 4 and its DMZ mode — the studio’s second shot at such an idea.
IGN spoke to Joe Cecot, Modern Warfare 4’s multiplayer creative director, to learn all about why Call of Duty is returning to the extraction shooter, and what was learned from its MW2 beta.
“The group of people that work on DMZ love DMZ, and they loved [the MW2 version]” reveals Cecot. “Even though the beta was very hard to make, we were very proud and happy with what we made, and we learned a lot.”
“We've worked on it for three plus years now,” he continues. “From the moment we finished live support, we moved into the next DMZ, the next big map with Hajin. And we knew we wanted to continue that. For a lot of us, this is our favorite kind of genre. It's that kind of tension.
“I think the other thing is there aren't too many genres that really you can have PvE, you can have PvP, you can have looting, you can have narrative, you can have completionists, you can have significant player progression, you have persistence, you have this amazing sense of player growth. I can have fun rescuing people. I can have fun working together. I can have fun going and just hunting people.”
Working together is something Call of Duty players aren’t often asked to do. Deathmatch and the constant search for the next kill have been at the core of its online experience for two decades now. Sure, you’ll act as a team when squadding up in multiplayer, or trying to be the last group standing in Warzone, but rarely are you asked to work together as a coherent unit to achieve your goal – it’s more often a dozen individuals working in tandem. Other extraction shooters like Arc Raiders have managed to foster a community and code of conduct from the ground up, almost building whole new languages through emotes and interactions in how to talk to strangers. Call of Duty players simply haven’t fostered anything like this over the years, in part because its multiplayer modes haven’t historically offered the tools to allow such behaviour. So when it comes to DMZ, how does Infinity Ward intend to rewire players who instinctively pull the trigger the moment they see another person?
“We think these kinds of games are very helpful when they do have that PVP. And I think it's that tension of not restricting behavior that makes it so interesting,” Cecot explains. “We saw cooperation in the original DMZ. We saw people communicate. We saw people work together. I experienced it myself. We have assimilation, which lets you merge with someone else and get onto the same squad. We have a truce flag in the pinwheel that you throw down, and it basically tells everyone in the area that an operator near you is requesting a truce. Ping it to acknowledge, and if you ping it, you both get a flag above your head when you look at each other. So you know we have a truce now, but it's non-binding. If you shoot them, they can shoot you. We have yes, no, and friendly pings as well that are global that you can do to each other if you're not on voice chat to say friendly, friendly.
“An order will never ask you to kill a player. And so though players can choose to hunt each other, we're careful to make sure that just killing a player isn't really valuable outside of the loop that's on them. Now, if you kill a player who has a bounty on their head because they've been killing other players, we have the new wanted system that, well, if you're wanted, people can pay for your intel to locate you and hunt you. Then we're kind of building an ecosystem where the killers can hunt each other, and the other players can kind of avoid them. So we're trying to walk that line of creating this sandbox, but I think there will be PVP, but I think there's a bunch of players that will have fun just communicating, talking to each other, and making friends.”
Cecot’s passion for the extraction shooter is clear to see, as he hopes for its continued growth as the big new multiplayer genre. Call of Duty successfully managed to jump on the battle royale bandwagon with Warzone, which hit on a formula following the series’ initial misfire with Blackout. Infinity Ward will be hoping that trend continues with MW4’s DMZ mode, succeeding where MW2’s previous beta stumbled four years ago.
When Arc Raiders launched last year, it instantly became the first true extraction shooter smash hit, with almost 1 million concurrent players across all platforms at its peak. Cult classics such as Escape from Tarkov and Hunt: Showdown paved the way, but Arc Raiders felt like a real breakthrough moment for the genre. Since then, though, player numbers have shrunk considerably for Arc Raiders. Meanwhile, Bungie’s Marathon has proven that even a best-in-class entry into the genre can struggle, with few logging into the game to witness its quality. Despite this, Cecot sees a bright future for the genre, and DMZ’s place within it.
“So to me, DMZ and the extraction shooter represents an evolution of the first-person shooter,” he says. “When I think about classic Quake, my first love, to Modern Warfare and Halo and the 5v5 or the 6v6, into the evolution into Battlefield and the big war into Battle Royale. After that, for me, it's like the extraction shooter is taking the MMO plus the Minecraft plus the first-person shooter, PVP, and we'll put it all on this big melting pot, and then we'll let players go find their own fun. So to me, it represents kind of an evolution of how players play video games as well.”
So, what has Infinity Ward learned from its first swing at the genre three years ago? It was by no means a disastrous attempt, with plenty of fun to be found, but it just never managed to capture the size of audience needed to become something more than the beta it launched as. It’s something Cecot and the team are looking to address this time around, with their biggest lesson learned centering on player progression and keeping them coming back for more.
“We knew making the original DMZ that player growth was core to extraction shooters,” says Cecot. “The original DMZ created a very fun sandbox with very low friction for entry. Your weapon was on a cooldown, your loadout was just like the rest, you could just equip. Loot was very available. And so it was very approachable, but it was that lack of player growth that I think made it less sticky.
“We had a lot of players come in and stay. They loved the sandbox. They love mastering the sandbox. They love the social aspect of it. They love that they could do whatever they wanted. But I think player growth is the thing that we knew we needed to hit really hard in this DMZ. And that's where upgrading your FOB came from. That's where the DMZ rank came from, where no matter what you do, you're earning XP, which is progressing your rank. So we're valuing your time. I think that's probably the biggest learning.”
Only time will tell if DMZ can have the same impact on the extraction shooter space as Warzone did on battle royale. Included as part of Modern Warfare 4, rather than as its own game or free-to-play service, it’s available to play now.
For more of Modern Warfare 4, check out our review of the campaign and whether Infinity Ward considers this to be the end of the reboot series.