Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare will allow players to pilot a transforming fighter plane that can be upgraded and customized. The fighter, referred to in the game as a Jackal, "can transform between atmospheric flight mode and zero-G flight mode for when you have to dogfight in the vacuum of space,"
According to Minkoff, Infinite Warfare will offer a seamless experience in which players are fully invested in not only their character, but also their vehicle. "It's kind of the Top Gun fantasy," he explained, noting that "it's your fighter that you get to upgrade and customize. You get to walk along the flight deck and have the flight crew preparing it for you and saluting you and you get into it and you fly out into these crazy missions that you chose to go to."
Instead of fragmenting the game by shoehorning in vehicle sequences, "they are seamlessly woven into the fiction of the character and the mechanics of the game," providing an experience that Minkoff described as being "completely holistic."
In this way, "you can be boots on ground, fighting through the streets of a city on earth, call down your Jackal, get into it, fly up through the atmosphere, engage in a dogfight over the orbit of earth, finish that dogfight, land on the deck of the carrier, get into the carrier, go up to the bridge, and order your ship to go to the next mission and all of it happens seamlessly with no loading screens."
While Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare will feature a linear story, Infinity Ward's upcoming shooter will also include non-linear elements that allow the player to earn various in-game rewards.
"As the captain of the UNSA Retribution, which is the carrier that you command, you can order it to go and engage in different missions in a non-linear order," Infinity Ward design director Jacob Minkoff told IGN.
"We are telling a linear story, but along the way you can choose to attack targets of opportunity, and attacking those targets of opportunity will reward you with various items and progression and loot elements that will help you to accomplish the next main mission that you accept from command," he added, noting they "will also reveal optional elements of the story."