It’s taking more and more creative skill to come up with something original in the Call of Duty series. Activision, which announced Call of Duty: Ghosts today at Microsoft’s next-generation Xbox One unveiling in Redmond, Wash., poured a lot of development resources, time, and money into making Ghosts into a game that delivers all-new gameplay, story, characters, and graphics for gamers who might be just a tad jaded. Observers have expected Call of Duty to hit its peak for years now, but Activision says the series is still defying gravity in terms of sales and player engagement.
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GamesBeat: What decisions did you make in terms of what to reveal? By showing an underwater level, did you intend to tout the graphics?
Daniel Suarez: Absolutely. If you look at what we’re trying to do this year, it’s delivering on all the key message points — new experience, new technology, new gameplay. That underwater level will be one of the things we demonstrate throughout the campaign, but I think that one really captured the graphic quality. The effects, the particles, the fish, the caustics in the water, looking at the light coming through — that hammers it home in terms of the new engine. The new world, we didn’t tackle that issue so much, but I can talk about that in terms of the story.
And then new gameplay experiences: We’ve had underwater in Call of Duty before, but it’s literally swimming from here to there. This is what I call an all-gullied-up experience underwater. It’s playable. The level we saw showed maybe four minutes of gameplay, but it’s actually a much longer level. The game plays up that suspense and stealth in underwater engagements that we’ve never done in Call of Duty before.
GamesBeat: It seems so beautiful that it’s more appropriate for a Finding Nemo sequel.
Suarez: Nah, I don’t think Nemo is going to blow up submarines. Maybe?
GamesBeat: How do you then communicate to people that “It looks better, but here’s why you’re really going to like it”?
Suarez: I want to touch on three key areas. One is that new world. That plays into why this Call of Duty is going to be different for everyone. Mark touched on it briefly in the video, but there’s a whole new universe we’re going to start with Ghosts. The game begins with a cataclysmic event. It demolishes the southern half of the United States. Unlike other Call of Duty games, you are now the underdog. The United States is decimated. It is no longer a superpower. You’re on the defensive. You and your brother are the two main characters portrayed throughout the game. What happens is that you meet up with this elite group of soldiers called the Ghosts. They’re a reconnaissance force that’s holding the line against this new superpower that’s coming in to invade the United States.
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The squad component is probably the most integral thing we’re trying to do in terms of narrative and in terms of emotion in the gameplay. We’re building a different type of game mechanic that we haven’t done in Call of Duty before. Traditionally, you have your buddy character, be it Woods or be it Captain Price. Now it’s your entire squad. We’ve added a dynamic group of A.I. supporting characters that will be with you. We also added a dog to the squad. That’s going to add a new dynamic in terms of gameplay, commanding the dog. He’s part of your squad, and he’s actually going to do things in the game that you haven’t done before.
What Stephen Gaghan did – he’s the writer we brought in; he wrote Traffic and he directed and wrote Syriana – he’s bringing in a different level of storytelling than what we’ve done before. We brought in David Goyer on Black Ops, and he was all about telling the dual storylines over longer time periods and creating these twists within the game. Gaghan brings a different level of human connection and character that we haven’t done in Call of Duty before. We believe that next gen will allow us to do that with the performances of the characters, the interactions with the A.I., the interactions with the dog, things like that. That’s the new world as it plays out.
GamesBeat: It seems like you guys are OK with creating parallel universes, where the U.S. gets destroyed over and over again.
Suarez: We can only blow up certain parts of the world so many times, so we have to create this new subgenre to allow us to do it. That’s a joke, by the way.
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What we try to do is just create these different universes that don’t intermingle with each other. So Black Ops is a distinct universe. Modern Warfare is a distinct universe. This is a new distinct subbrand in its own universe, too.
Adding on to what I was saying, you have this new world, and the new technology is what gets that new world working. We’re rebuilding all the elements of the Call of Duty engine one by one, starting with the animation system, the lighting system, the rendering system, and the particle system. All these things have been rebuilt for those next-gen platforms to allow us to do more than we’ve done before. The number of bones that go into a character’s face has doubled. The amount of what we can do in terms of particle effects has multiplied six times over. Everything that we’re doing is amped up to a new level – lighting, how we can play with audio, all of those things are going into making this the most beautiful, most dynamic, biggest leap in Call of Duty that we’ve seen.
Once you take those components together, then you add that last concept, which is that everything we do with the tech is to drive the gameplay — how the player will engage, who they’re engaging with, what they’re doing. Engaging with the dog character — that’s going to be a new gameplay experience. The way you’re going to move the environment – mantling over things, peeking over side walls – these are subtle little things, but they’re things we’ve never been able to do before.
That animation system is interesting, actually. Traditionally in Call of Duty, your animation system in single-player was always much more fluid because we could support more animations in single-player than we could in multiplayer. That system has now moved over to the multiplayer system, so multiplayer animations will be much more fluid than we’ve had before. It’s all these things that come together into why we believe Ghosts is going to be the biggest leap forward for Call of Duty.
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GamesBeat: You’re designing this for new hardware. This hardware may or may not be in different states of readiness. I think they usually find out toward the end of the process whether they really hit their performance targets or not. Are the chips really running that fast, or are they too hot? It seems like you almost need a contingency plan to make sure you hit 60 frames per second. What if it comes out, and it winds up that you can only do 57?
Suarez: One of the benefits that we have, being Call of Duty, is that our partners on the first-party side really want us to be the benchmark game for their system. They want our game to look the best on their platform. There’s a lot of early collaboration in terms of seeing where the chipsets are going, understanding where those raw parts are going, doing tests with them, and understanding how that all works. We’re going to have a pretty good sense of where we’re going to be. That’s just refining over time.
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The people that we have working on this, from the Infinity Ward side and on the supporting teams we have working with them, have been through console transitions before. They know and understand what needs to happen – when those things will change, when new APIs come in, what impact that entails for their development. They need to be fluid and understand those things, but I think our relationships with the first parties have us set in a good position to allow us to execute our vision and have a 60 frames per second game running on a networked system. We’ll be able to deliver that hallmark Call of Duty multiplayer experience out of the box on day one.
GamesBeat: Do you have a technology system that can scale up to fit whatever hardware it’s running on? Or does it almost feel like you have to design one game for current consoles and a brand-new game for next-gen hardware?
Suarez: We’re not doing that right now. Right now, we’re developing and pushing the boundaries of next gen as much as we can, but keeping in mind that we’re going to take that technology and get it to fit on the current generation. That’s why we have the teams that we have, to be able to cover those bases. For us, the number one goal is to get the best-looking game running on the next generation. Then we’ll ensure that we get a game running on current consoles that delivers all the bells and whistles that we can. But there are going to be differences.
GamesBeat: Will you be able to do things like have a multiplayer match between generations?
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Suarez: Cross-generational multiplayer gaming is not something we have talked about. I don’t think it’s something we’ll be able to do. If the first parties allow it, we might consider it.
GamesBeat: It does sound like it makes sense to do very robust versions of each one. It’s almost doubling the amount of teams you have to use.
Suarez: The structure we have for the development of Ghosts is that we have Infinity Ward leading the development on the creative side and driving everything for the multiplayer and everything else. We have Raven also helping out on this. They’ve been a supporting team on the franchise now for a number of years. We’ve added Neversoft as well. This is their first time on the franchise, but they have a lot of experience working on console transitions dating back to the PSX, understanding all the technical logistics that need to happen there. Both of those teams are supporting IW on the current-gen and next-gen execution, with Infinity Ward leading the development going forward.
GamesBeat: The complexity of this business is going up and up.
Suarez: The point I made to someone earlier – [Activision CEO] Eric [Hirshberg] said this as well – is that engagement on the games, sales of the games, daily average users, all of that is the biggest it’s ever been for the franchise. When you think of 30 million or 40 million playing Call of Duty on a monthly basis, it’s mind-boggling how many people we have engaged in this franchise. For us, we have to deliver the best game we can year over year, ensuring that the gameplay is there, the narrative is there, that emotional experience they expect out of Call of Duty is there. I know you play a lot of MP. It’s fun, it’s exciting, you really want to go in and compete. That has to be there. Getting a large group of people to support that vision every year is critical to our business.
GamesBeat: There’s going to be more competition than ever for the second half.
Suarez: Console transitions are always a challenge, but that’s what makes this job fun. Everybody will work hard. It’ll be exciting. We haven’t seen this happen in a number of years. It’ll be fun to see what the first parties are putting out, seeing what the systems can do. Even seeing what the competition is doing will be interesting. People always ask us, “Are you nervous about what so-and-so is doing?” No. From a gamer’s perspective, those are the things that challenge us and make our games better. We’re waiting to see if someone comes up with something innovative and new. That’s going to challenge us to do even better the next time.