How All Ghillied Up Changed Call of Duty Forever – Art of the Level

Estimated reading time: 16 minutes

Developer Infinity Ward changed first-person shooters forever when it launched Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare in 2007. Set on the frontlines of a politically murky war, its adrenaline-fueled action set pieces redefined campaign design for an entire generation. But while levels like Crew Expendable and Charlie Don’t Surf channelled the trademark intensity of Call of Duty’s World War 2 days, one mission set the series’ rulebook ablaze and threw it out of the window. It was called All Ghillied Up.

Unfolding amongst the ghostly remains of post-Chernobyl Pripyat, All Ghillied Up is a sniper mission that embraces patience and precision. Its Metal Gear Solid-inspired stealth sensibilities mark a significant shift in gears not just for Modern Warfare’s story, but the entire Call of Duty franchise.

To find out how All Ghillied Up was put together IGN spoke to designer Mohammad Alavi, who created the mission alongside colleagues at Infinity Ward. With his insight, we examine how All Ghillied Up makes use of custom artificial intelligence, combat puzzles, and tense scripted sequences to create a heart-stopping mission behind enemy lines.

For the first few games in the series, Call of Duty was pretty much all action, all of the time. Developer Infinity Ward built its first game in the Quake 3 Arena engine, and it’s not hard to see traces of Quake bleeding through in those rapid-paced 1940s shootouts. But by Call of Duty 4, Infinity Ward was exploring new methods with which to deliver its trademark intensity. By filtering the story through a more cinematic lens, the studio was able to shift the atmosphere of the campaign from mission to mission. The first clear example of this comes with Death From Above, a chillingly detached aerial mission witnessed entirely through the monochrome targeting display of an AC-130 gunship. But it’s Modern Warfare’s thirteenth mission that would truly change the series forever.

All Ghillied Up puts players into the boots of John Price, the moustachioed SAS captain who until this moment was only ever a non-player character. Told through flashback, the mission’s events see a young Price and his superior, Captain MacMillan, head to the ruins of Pripyat, the Ukrainian city devastated by the Chernobyl disaster. There they must assassinate Imran Zakhaev, a Russian arms dealer and Modern Warfare’s shadowy antagonist. But before they can set up their sniper nest, the duo must first work their way through a number of stealth-driven gameplay sequences in order to cross the enemy-occupied town. It’s a design that, back in 2007, was worlds apart from anything Call of Duty had ever done before.

The idea for All Ghillied Up was first imagined by Steve Fukuda, one of Modern Warfare’s four lead designers. Inspired by fellow designer Mackey McCandlish’s suggestion of a mission set in Pripyat, Fukuda realised that the location’s abandoned buildings, rusted fairground rides, and overgrown fields provided the perfect setting for snipers draped in ghillie suits. However, not everyone at the studio was as enthusiastic about the idea as Fukuda was.

“Nobody thought it was cool, including myself,” says Mohammad Alavi, former Infinity Ward member and designer of All Ghillied Up. “I always liked the more bombastic missions and this was the opposite of that. And I was finishing up cargo ship and [Fukuda] couldn’t find anybody who wanted to make this level.”

Nobody thought it was cool, including myself. I always liked the more bombastic missions and this was the opposite of that.

Thankfully, Fukuda had a killer pitch that would convince Alavi to take on the project. “He’s like, ‘You’re walking in a field, you come up to a bush and you see two guys past the bush and you raise your gun. You’re about to take a shot, and the bush turns to you and goes, hold up,’” recalls Alavi. “And that’s all he said. And I was like, ‘I’m in.’”

In direct contrast to Alavi’s previous work, the explosive cargo ship-sinking Crew Expendable, this was going to be the series’ first genuine stealth level. And to achieve that, Alavi would have to pick apart the very fundamentals of Call of Duty. For a series that had trained players to shoot at targets with impunity, All Ghillied Up would demand that players move their finger off the trigger.

“The key was in the very, very, very beginning, I had to set a tone,” Alavi says. “So that very beginning part was very intentionally slow, very intentionally sombre, the music was sombre.

“[Captain MacMillan] very calmly gets up to show you that’s what you look like,” he explains, referring to MacMillan’s ghillie suit that makes him look like a bush. “So you’re completely invisible if you’re not moving.”

Call of Duty has always used a friendly character to coax players from objective to objective, but All Ghillied Up casts Captain MacMillan as your indisputable senior. His tone of voice and custom animations make it clear he’s not to be trifled with: he’ll tell you when to shoot, when to crouch, when to run, and you’ll follow along willingly. This helps disguise the tightly scripted nature of the level, and guides you through its consecutive sequences at an exact pace.

“We went through a lot of very custom animations for MacMillan at the very beginning,” he recalls. “He slowly walks up there, he’s like, ‘Hold up’, a lot more than any other Call of Duty mission normally [was]. But it was all to just set the mood, set the tone, to basically tell the player, ‘Hey, slow down. Hey, watch me. Hey, watch me.’”

Tactical Espionage Action

So All Ghillied Up was going to be a sneaking mission. Quiet. Restrained. Just that fact alone introduced a huge amount of complexity into the project. Alavi was faced with a simple truth: Call of Duty was an intense shooter. Its very DNA – the code underpinning the whole experience – didn’t understand the concept of stealth.

“It was war all the time,” says Alavi. “The AI was never designed to not see you. So I was like, ‘We can fake this.’ But I don’t like doing that because you can see through it instantly, right? I was like, ‘Or, I can make this Metal Gear Solid style. I can make this the best stealth mission in a Call of Duty game.’ And without telling anybody, because I knew they were going to try to stop me, that’s what I tried to do.”

By his own admission, Alavi is not a programmer. And he’s certainly not an AI programmer. But after a conversation with Infinity Ward’s AI master, he was able to envision a way he could force Modern Warfare’s enemies into a stealth format.

“Basically [the AI programmer] gave me the ability to shorten the [enemies’] view cone,” Alavi explains. “So I hard coded it where if you’re standing up, the enemy’s view cones are standard. But if you’re crouching, it’s less. And if you’re prone, then it’s way less.”

“And then on top of that, I just had to hard place everything. I started placing triggers for grassy areas versus non grassy areas, which would change that view cone. And then I started placing triggers for shadows. So I baked the shadows into the level, figured out where they were, and then placed triggers where the shadows were so it would bring in the view cone even more. And then what started out as just a couple of simple things ballooned into almost 20,000 lines of poorly written script that literally took me, I want to say, two months.”

The script may have been poor, but only one thing mattered: it worked. The enemy Russian troops were quite literally blind to the player crawling just inches away from their ankles, and that was the first step in creating a heart-pounding stealth experience. The next was to craft a sequence that would have players holding their breath along with their character. Enter All Ghillied Up’s tense crawl through a Russian convoy.

Alavi wanted to create something that felt more dangerous than anything Call of Duty had attempted so far. “Okay, well what if you’re in this situation that in any other terms, you’d just be dead? Like a hundred percent dead,” he says. “There’s no way you and this other guy with two sniper rifles can take on an entire army that’s coming straight for you. Well, what if you can just lay in the grass and they just don’t see you? [That] was the cool idea. But then the hard part was making that actually fun.”

“Originally I had all these dynamic paths [the enemies] could take that would adjust to your position,” he explains. If they thought they saw something, then they would shift the whole convoy. It was just too much. It was too hard, it was too complicated, it was unreadable. And I stripped it back a lot and I basically just made it so they all have set paths, they’re just not going in a straight line. They’re doing this slight curve so that it constantly feels like, ‘Oh shit, oh no, now I kind of need to [adjust my position]’. It’s to give you a little bit of tension so it’s not just a straight line, but something that’s learnable and easier.”

“I’m obviously faking a bunch of stuff there,” he reveals. “I’m bringing their view cone to zero basically, so they can walk right on top of you. The only difference is that if you turn, then their view cone opens up to give you that feeling of, ‘Okay, I’ve got to move slowly, I’ve got to turn slowly’. And it’s literally only for that section. But it feels innate, it feels like it makes sense, so it doesn’t really need to be taught.”

Hiding in the grass and not moving a muscle while enemies walk by is one of All Ghillied Up’s most recognisable images. But this is also a mission that hands you a silenced rifle and challenges you to become an elite sniper. It’s when the safety catch is flicked off that the level unlocks what has become a Call of Duty hallmark: synchronised sniping.

Two Targets, One Trigger

“So what happened was actually that, in that very first encounter, I had MacMillan not shoot the second guy,” Alavi reveals. “But it felt terrible. Because if you’re bee-lined on this one dude, you’re putting all your focus in on him and you’re trying to get to the other guy, and if he just starts firing his loud AK, then you feel cheated, right?”

The answer was to have MacMillan observe your every shot and clean up if things went wrong. Players who instantly grasp the stealth sensibilities of the mission will wait for the soldiers to separate and look away from each other before taking them out one at a time. But MacMillan works as a safety net; if the second guy sees your shot, he’s dead before he can even raise his gun. This keeps the mission flowing, and creates an authentic sense of teamwork between you and your partner.

Considering how synchronised sniping has become the iconic image of All Ghillied Up, it’s actually used pretty infrequently; just twice across the entire mission. The best example of it comes at the mission’s midway point in a sequence in which you must cleanly dispatch four enemies. As with all the best stealth encounters, this is a lethal puzzle to be solved.

“It was like two guys right next to each other, and they’re kind of walking and then they face away and that’s your opening,” Alavi explains. “And then there’s the second set by the pond where they’re throwing the bodies away. Now you’ve got four guys. […] And now there’s a puzzle. It’s like, do I shoot immediately? Because I’m probably going to lure all four of them. Or do I wait for them to come by? And obviously MacMillan’s giving you some advice, but he leaves it up to you.”

Player choice is not something typically associated with Call of Duty campaigns. But All Ghillied Up, a mission that seems practically ‘on-rails’ from a distance, is actually surprisingly malleable. Many scenarios across the level can be solved in multiple ways, and the script will even acknowledge and respond to your actions.

“So basically I will say this: I will never make a stealth mission again,” laughs Alavi. “Because what started off as ‘I want this to feel right’ turned into ‘I need to account for every goddamn situation’.”

“So yeah, what if you shoot the helicopter?” he says of an attack chopper that flies by mid-way through the mission. “Well, it’s going to look dumb if it just goes by. It’s also going to feel bad if it’s an insta-kill, so I’ll just throw some rockets in here. And now I’ve got to make the roof [of the church] explodable. So I’d have to spend a week making the roof explodable.”

“I just brute forced everything, to be honest,” he reveals. “But I did it because I wanted you to be able to be like, ‘Can I do this?’ and the answer’s, ‘Yes, yes you can.’”

In most cases, All Ghillied Up rewards your curiosity. You can destroy the helicopter, you can sneak by without shooting, you can go all-guns blazing, and you can disobey orders. But there is one moment in which, should you defy MacMillan, your choice comes back to bite you. You definitely shouldn’t shoot the wild dogs that roam the streets of Pripyat.

“That was super gamey, but I didn’t care,” laughs Alavi. “I just thought it was funny. I was like, ‘You deserve to have the hounds of hell attack you if you shoot this dog.’ But there was a bit of research that went into that. We’d learned that there were a bunch of feral dogs that had somehow survived the radiation and started hunting in packs. They’d kind of reverted back to their wolf days.”

Heart Racing, Legs Crawling

All Ghillied Up is followed by One Shot, One Kill; the explosive second half of the assassination mission in which you must hold out against wave upon wave of relentless enemies as you wait to be extracted from Pripyat. The pacing of these two missions almost mimics the act of a calculated shot; the slow, steady intake of breath that’s held just long enough to steady the crosshair, followed by the explosion in the chamber.

This careful attention to pacing can also be seen within All Ghillied Up itself, which weaves between slower moments of predator-like confidence and hurried dashes to new hiding spots. But, as with almost everything in game design, this masterful pacing didn’t come out of Alavi’s head fully formed.

“Working on that level actually taught me a lot about how important pacing is,” he says. “Not just inside of a level, but across the game as a whole.”

“The first mistake I’d made was putting way too many enemies in the level and you had no breathers in between,” he recalls. “I realised that it didn’t feel good and I needed these moments to both rejoice in doing so well or getting out of a hairy situation, but also just kind of reset the tension again.”

We can see this unfold in the final two sequences of the level. As Price and MacMillan close in on the abandoned hotel from which they will conduct their assassination, they cross paths with a second Russian convoy.

“I was like, ‘Okay, well you’ve gone through this whole mission with your ghillie suit, right? Well, what if I take that away from you? What if you can’t hide in the grass anymore? Can we still do something fun there? Can we still do something with high tension?’”

Working on that level actually taught me a lot about how important pacing is. Not just inside of a level, but across the game as a whole.

With no way around and no grass to hide in, you must use your enemies’ own trucks as cover and cross to the other side unseen. It’s a moment that forces you to break every rule you’ve learnt so far.

“And I’m like, ‘Well there’s a big convoy and there’s no grass’,” Alavi recalls. “I want to do the same thing I did last time, but I want to make it amped up and more exciting. It’s not you moving slowly, it’s you hauling ass and praying for God. It’s just like, how could I make this section different and interesting from the last but still stick to the theme?”

This almost suicidal Hail Mary is the heart-stopping final hurdle. After such a tense, focused journey through enemy-occupied territory, the closing moments of All Ghillied Up give you time to regain your composure as you make your way through a maze of abandoned buildings completely devoid of enemies.

“I had originally put enemies in there, but quite frankly I couldn’t get it to work,” Alavi admits. “Because the beginning of the level was all outdoors and I had scripted all the AI to work with that super well. So by the time I got inside, it wasn’t really great. Also you’re in a ghillie suit, so it doesn’t really make sense to be able to be in cover. And I didn’t want to change the feeling of the level yet because I knew the next one, the one that Mackey made, which was One Shot, One Kill, was basically turned up to 10. It’s a full on action level, right? So I was like, ‘That’s doing its own thing. You know what? Everybody’s expecting something to happen. I bet I can just pull tension with music and dialogue’. And I feel like it worked out.”

The execution of pacing and tension across the duration of All Ghillied Up is the secret to its success. While the custom artificial intelligence is the vital technology that makes the entire mission possible, it’s the careful and deliberate positioning of enemies, cover, and scripted scenarios that make it an all-time classic. By forcing players to slow down, take precautions, and consider each and every shot, it succeeds in being a memorable high-point of not just Modern Warfare, but the entire Call of Duty series.

As a result of All Ghillied Up’s success, most subsequent games in the franchise feature a stealth-focused mission. Synchronised sniper shots have become as much a part of the Modern Warfare series’ DNA as Captain Price’s bushy moustache. But the mission’s legacy is more than just stealth. Along with Call of Duty 4’s other experimental approaches, it helped steer the future of the series towards what it’s been for over a decade now: a globe-hopping collection of concept missions built around an ever-changing array of novelties. All things considered, it’s not hyperbole to say that All Ghillied Up changed Call of Duty forever.

Matt Purslow is IGN’s UK News and Features Editor.