Crossfire is being built by the duo behind Infinite Warfare and Uncharted's best levels

Crossfire – the new shooter revealed at Summer Game Fest – is being developed by Jacob Minkoff and Taylor Kurosaki, the creative partnership responsible for some of the most memorable design work in modern blockbuster games. The two revealed the project together on stage, with Kurosaki describing over 18 years of shared work building character-driven games that fuse design and story.

Both men cut their teeth at Naughty Dog. Kurosaki spent more than a decade there as a narrative design lead, while Minkoff helped bring Uncharted 2's iconic train sequence to life and designed the sinking cruise ship escape in Uncharted 3: Drake's Deception – a level that forces players to constantly re-read a familiar space as it floods, tilts, and collapses around them. That idea of a reconfiguring environment became a throughline in their work. In Crossfire, it shows up as an adaptive cover system: protagonist Layla dynamically adjusts her stance based on terrain complexity and enemy sightlines, which Minkoff says fundamentally changes how players relate to the environment and turns positioning into an active skill.

The two left Naughty Dog after Amy Hennig's departure, during the creative upheaval that elevated the Last of Us directors to lead the studio. They landed at Infinity Ward – a 25-minute drive away – at a low point for the Call of Duty developer. The studio's founders had left acrimoniously years earlier, taking key talent to found Respawn Entertainment, and 2013's Call of Duty: Ghosts had felt directionless as a result. Minkoff and Kurosaki helped change that. Their 2016 collaboration Infinite Warfare – where Kurosaki served as narrative director and Minkoff as design director – grounded a space-set FPS in deliberate character drama, borrowing the right lessons from Wolfenstein: The New Order, including casting Brian Bloom in the lead and building a conversationally-rich hub world aboard the warship UNSA Retribution.

This is an opinion piece from IGN's Jeremy Peel, a writer who has played every Call of Duty campaign and has strong feelings about Black Ops 3. His read is that Crossfire has two of the best design minds in the business behind it – and the stage chemistry between Minkoff and Kurosaki at SGF seemed to back that up.