Crossfire getting a new single-player game from former Naughty Dog, Modern Warfare devs

That’s No Moon, a studio founded by industry veterans from studios like Naughty Dog and Infinity Ward, has revealed its debut game, Crossfire. Currently in development for PlayStation 5, Windows PC, and Xbox Series X, the narrative-driven single-player game is a reimagining of Smilegate’s long-running multiplayer shooter series.

Ahead of the game’s official reveal at Summer Game Fest, Polygon visited That’s No Moon’s Los Angeles studio to learn how the new developer crossed paths with Smilegate for its unexpected debut. We also got a glimpse of a live gameplay demo that showed off Crossfire’s innovative approach to cover-based shooting.

Crossfire is a third-person military shooter with a hint of sci-fi based on real-world tech. Its debut trailer teases a dramatic action game with lots of stealth sneaking, cover-based shootouts, and a touch of gadgetry (including an invisibility cloak). That’s No Moon stresses that all the shooting is fairly grounded; players can’t simply run into a location and “Rambo” their way out of a situation. There are only a few shots between life and death.

Though it looks like a fairly standard shooter at a glance, its “adaptive cover” system sets it apart. Crossfire does away with boxy chest-high walls that your character magnetically sticks to. Instead, the environments are more realistic, and the player characters dynamically adapt to them like a real person would. If they walk up to a low stone wall, for instance, they will naturally drop into a crab-walk to slink by enemies. In the pre-alpha demo I saw, I watched the character’s body contort to match rocky terrain, sometimes dropping to a full crawl to stay hidden behind a hill. That’s No Moon said it was inspired by videos of a well-known European vista that people have turned into a natural airsoft gun arena.

It’s a complicated system custom-built around Unreal Engine 5 — so complex that game director Jacob Minkoff isn’t worried about anyone beating the team to the punch: “As we’ve shown to people that we were hiring onto the project what we’re doing, people have said, ‘Aren’t you worried that it’s going to leak?’ I’m like, I don’t care! No one can do this!” Minkoff, who previously worked at Naughty Dog and Infinity Ward, says that the system was born out of a desire to push the genre forward, something that’s core to That’s No Moon’s philosophy as a studio.

“There’s a need to recognize when the technology has gotten to a point where the decisions you made decades ago, because of the limitations of the simulation of the time, don’t serve you anymore, and you need to make a sea change,” Minkoff told Polygon. “This is an opportunity to do that with third-person cover based shooters.”

Though it shares a name with Smilegate’s series of mega-popular multiplayer shooters, it's a very different kind of game. Crossfire is a cinematic single-player game. It will not feature a multiplayer mode or any kind of live service support. That was no problem for Smilegate, the South Korean publisher who invested $100 million in That’s No Moon back when it was founded in 2021. Chief creative officer Taylor Kurosaki explained that when Smilegate approached That’s No Moon about the project, it didn’t give them a specific pitch. Its only request was a big-picture one: “We want you to make a game that will be beloved in the West.”

“[Smilegate] said all the right things,” Kurosaki told Polygon. “They said, ‘We want to work in the West. We want to work with Western developers. We want to make games that are universally appealing. You guys have made games in the West; we haven’t. So how about we back you, and you guys make what you believe in?’ And they have stuck to their word.”

This isn’t the first time that Smilegate has tried to lean on veteran developers to broaden Crossfire’s international appeal. The studio released CrossfireX in 2022, a console version of Crossfire that featured a single-player campaign created by Remedy Entertainment. It was critically panned at the time, ranking among the worst-reviewed games of 2022. That’s No Moon hopes that its own take on Crossfire will benefit from being a focused single-player game with systems built around its narrative, rather than something that has to shapeshift around a multiplayer mode.

Narrative is a main focus for That’s No Moon. The story revolves around two people with polar opposite personalities and motivations who have to team up to fight against an existential threat dubbed The Pressure. On one side, there’s Layla Qassam, an anti-establishment gun-for-hire played by Claudia Doumit (The Boys). Kurosaki described her as “Greenpeace with guns.” Her foil is Delroy Cross, a man who is fighting for the stability of the institutions Layla is opposed to. Cross is played by American Gods actor Ricky Whittle, who also played a character named Cross in the Crossfire episode of Amazon’s Secret Level series. That’s No Moon has yet to reveal what united them into a buddy-cop premise, but the team promises that both are nuanced, flawed characters.

That last part is no surprise considering Kurosaki and Minkoff’s history with telling morally gray stories at Naughty Dog and Infinity Ward. (The duo is most well-known for its work on Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, after all.) Kurosaki describes Crossfire as the game he’s always wanted to make — a shooter that doesn’t deal in black and white absolutes.

“Narratively, we don’t really believe in the villain trope,” Kurosaki said. “We’ve had various people who have been in our orbit from time to time who say ‘Make someone that’s super hateable!’ It just doesn’t come naturally to me. They say write what you know, and a lot of the games that we’ve made relate to what’s going on in our personal lives, or our careers, or our worldview. The game we’ve always wanted is: What if we had a game where there isn’t a villain that I’m so angry at that I want to shoot him in the face?”

Kurosaki said that the team was naturally inspired by the modern political landscape, noting that development started during the COVID-19 era. (“You know, keyboards flying and all that stuff,” he said.) The story, as he described it, tries to encourage a world where people can fiercely disagree, but still be civil with one another at the end of the day. He said that a multiplayer shooter like Crossfire is already a perfect metaphor for that theme. He talked about the experience of playing a heated match online with strangers, being able to say “GG” at the end, and lining up to matchmake again.

“You don’t wipe someone’s account off the face of the internet forever. That’s not what winning looks like,” he said. “We are diametrically opposed, we are going to fight tooth and nail to win this match, and then we’re going to say ‘Good job, see you in the next one.’ That feels like Cross and Layla. They don’t other one another. They say, look, we’re still different. I still believe what I believe, and you believe what you believe, but we have a shared humanity. And that shared humanity is what keeps us alive against this existential threat.”

“It’s about the fundamental truth of who people are, regardless of time period,” Minkoff added. “I think the story of two people with opposing views learning to see each other’s narrative as valid despite holding opposing views is a timeless story.”

After discussing the story, I asked the team if they are worried that players might find Crossfire’s worldview a little too simplistic. On paper, it sounds like a centrist fantasy that gets complicated when you start to interrogate what it is that people actually disagree on. Are we talking about taxes or human rights? Even Kurosaki’s multiplayer metaphor feels fairly generous next to what it’s actually like to play shooters online for many. (I wouldn’t call many of my own online experiences friendly.) Kurosaki thought hard about the question for a moment before settling on a confident no and pointing to another media metaphor.

“It’s an archetype,” he said. “Jake and I believe in certain genres. We say, same but different. There are these archetypes of characters. The Odd Couple. Planes, Trains and Automobiles. Midnight Run. A big one for me is Looney Tunes. They clock in, and they bonk each other with giant hammers, and then they clock out and say ‘see you tomorrow!’ That seems like a perfect world.”

Whether a mega-budget military shooter will have more to say than a children’s cartoon will come down to context. We don’t know what “existential threat” is strong enough to bring together fighters on opposite ends of the political spectrum yet. We also don’t know who the people they’re killing in brutal throat-slitting animations are, but I suppose there will be no common ground to be found there. (Not very Bugs Bunny of you, Layla.) Crossfire is aiming for emotional maturity, but like That’s No Moon, it will need to prove that it has something important to say once the gunfire clears.

Crossfire is currently in development for PlayStation 5, Windows PC, and Xbox Series X. It does not have a release date.