Ten years ago, the Call of Duty series was known for being somewhat controversial (think of the No Russian mission ten years ago). Now, the franchise is returning to the roots on this front as well, but the former director of Call of Duty: WWII doesn’t think it’s a good idea…
„I respect every developer who strives to deliver their work as an extension or reflection of their artistic vision. That said, [Modern Warfare] seems like a tough challenge for any studio, especially if they are being pushed by publishing to be more controversial and ‘darker’ for the sake of headlines.
The creative challenges of realistic ‘modern warfare’ are complex. Western ‘heroes’ killing ‘villains’ in the Middle East simply isn’t good enough. Equally, I hope the game’s stated goal to depict the realism of war was an unfortunate choice of words, rather than the actual intent to depicting the unspeakable atrocities that are the reality of today’s modern conflicts,” Michael Condrey, Call of Duty: WWII’s director, who now heads a studio at Take-Two under 2K Games, told VentureBeat. Infinity Ward, the developers of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, has responded on Twitter: „To be very clear, we’re making the exact game we want to make, and we can’t wait until October 25th.” (The game launches this day.)
On the game’s website, a blog post details the technological advancements. „Previously, we couldn’t push as many triangles or as much geometry. The new system allows us to push roughly five times more geometry per frame than we used to on consoles. Previous Call of Duty games was pushing around three million polygons per frame, [up to around] five million. Recently, we raised the artificial limit we had imposed on our game engine; to 16-17 million polygons per frame. We’ve had it up to silly levels; 24 million triangles per frame, and this is all to ensure we get all the data we have grabbed and match it in the game,” Michal Drobot, the principal rendering engineer and studio head of Infinity Ward Poland, wrote.
„Every single cubic inch of air around you… it is filled with something. Dust. Dirt. Aerosols. Gas. And it can change your vision, and how lighting reacts, but you can also use it in the game’s storytelling. That something happened at a location before you arrived. We really pushed hard with volumetric lighting, so every single light in the game is volumetric light; a real light with volumetrics built into it.
We have specifications where our artists can change how dense the air is in any part of the environment. Maybe a cellar is dense with dust particles. And you can change this by your actions, and by events; so maybe there’s an airstrike and the air around you becomes much thicker, and we experimented with that, to make sure volumetric lighting is part of the gameplay itself; it affects how we play, and the visuals,” he added.
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare is out on October 25 on PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC.
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