Call of Duty: Warzone - Power Grab

A limited-time Warzone mode where players collect enemy dog tags to earn rewards

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Senior Technical Designer responsible for design and implementation of Power Grab game mode
High Moon Studios
~10
Radiant, Proprietary Text Scripting tool, Perforce, JIRA
2021
May 21, 2021

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Studio:
Team Size:
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Description

'Power Grab' is a limited-time mode in Call of Duty: Warzone that changes the usual battle royale flow by rewarding aggressive play and scavenging. Instead of relying solely on buying back teammates or using Gulag revives, players collect dog tags from fallen enemies or found on the map to fill a “reward meter” that grants items, streaks, and even respawns. The match features fewer buy stations, a smaller initial circle, and faster zone closures, increasing the pressure to engage in combat and keep moving. Power Grab debuted during Warzone’s "Season 3: Reloaded" as part of its rotating limited-time seasonal updates, and it quickly became a fan favorite for its fast pace and fresh twist on the mode.

Responsibilities

I worked with a small team of technical designers to design and implement a new limited time mode for Call of Duty: Warzone called 'Power Grab' solely using script and almost entirely pre-existing assets.

Notable Contributions

Developed multiple design specs for a new Warzone game mode, ensuring concepts matched the season’s “80s action-movie” theme and were technically feasible.
Built and iterated on playable prototypes using internal scripting tools, rapidly identifying the strongest direction for production.
Led the prototype-to-production transition, collaborating with engineering and QA to implement features and remove technical blockers.
Tuned, debugged, and polished the final mode through launch, contributing to a smooth release and strong player engagement as a fan-favorite limited-time mode.

Key Takeaway

Follow the fun.

There’s an old, somewhat alarming adage among game developers that to be a good designer you need to be willing to “kill your own babies”. What this actually means is it is important that you can look at even your own ideas objectively. It’s easy to get overly committed to your original idea and miss the signs that it isn’t working out or that you may have even stumbled upon something better.

Power Grab wasn’t originally designed to be anything like what the final mode ended up being. We tried a lot of ideas based on arcade games of the time like Missile Command and Space Invaders. We saw some initial success with these prototypes, but it was clear that the ideas were going to be too complicated to implement and too difficult to concisely explain to players.

We could feel that the pieces of 80s arcade action were there, but something was missing. We knew that to match the release’s aesthetic, the mode needed to reward action and aggression over the tactics and strategy of typical battle royales. We played with the elements we had already created remixing our original concepts and then came up with this idea based on the combos and high score-chasing that permeated arcade games from the 80s. The successes of following that fun built on each other, and the result was the Power Grab limited time mode as it finally released.

All this to say, the fun often isn’t where you expected it to be when you initially started. Being able to see and follow these threads of fun and not get stuck focusing on your original vision is what separates a good designer from a great one.