We all know how Modern Warfare rolls by now, right? Right. The single player will be a throwaway evening's entertainment, quickly forgotten in the face of the stonking multiplayer.
Can Modern Warfare 3, out tomorrow, break from franchise tradition? Will it deliver a campaign worth mentioning in the same breath as killstreaks, Care Packages and attack dogs? Believe it or not, there's a reasonable chance it will. Sledgehammer Games - founded by veterans of the Dead Space series - is one of the hands at the wheel, and if there's one thing Sledgehammer knows, it's how to entertain offline.
Before the quotage kicks off, here's a rundown of all our exclusive interview coverage so far:
Modern Warfare 3 online: the new AC-130 and why they killed One Man Army
Infinity Ward on MW3's "No Russian" equivalent: mainstream viewers will "pass right over it"
Modern Warfare 3 producer defends quick-scoping, explains "more challenging" aiming
Modern Warfare 3 director "can't imagine a game that gives you more"
Given all the detail you have in this game, keeping to 60 frames a second must be a real nightmare. How do you pull it off?
Brett Robbins: Well, Joe can probably speak to the art more than I can, but as far as design goes you just want to totally immerse the player whatever that location is, so you just do a ton of research and our Art team does a lot of research on making sure they get every detail right.
Joe Salud: Yeah, a good place to start would be Google Maps, we go to Street View and we just study it as if we were there. The concept team goes really deep and they study the set dressing, what people wear, just the culture things that's in that place, the architecture, you know. We try to get the overall impression down, right first. So when you come in there, within a couple of seconds you're like "Oh these feels just like it." And then if they decide "Oh, I want to dig deep and look at more specific things", we try to represent them too.
But the engine is optimised. This engine has the ability to draw on-screen in the way that no other engine I've worked with has been able to do, so it's pretty impressive.
You seem to have taken a tighter approach to environments in Modern Warfare 3, kind of like the first Modern Warfare. It feels toned-down in comparison to Modern Warfare 2.
Brett Robbins: Well we've done, I think, a bit of both. Because we have some levels in this game that are bigger than any levels in Modern Warfare 2: Manhattan and the New York Harbour level and things like that are just... I think we went much bigger on scale than what we've seen before. But then we also have some levels that are just much smaller, much tighter and really pile on the detail levels like our... we have a level that takes place in India that is I think really strong in that way.
So it's kind of... I think we've gone to the point now where - and this sounds a little corny - but we're sort of just limited by our imagination because the engine, the technology and our techniques - it's not just the engine, it's also what art techniques we use and what design techniques we use - kind of allow us to do whatever we want to do. So it's really just a matter of "what do we want to do?" and what experiences we want to create and we feel like we have expertise now in handling both big epic scale and tight, really refined detail scale.
8 comments so far...
danhalen74 on 7 Nov '11 said:
i cant bloody wait....the haters can kiss my ass, i love a bit of COD....just wait, within about 10 minutes this thread will be full of whiny bitches racing to tell each other how they're not buying or arent interested but cant stop posting about it.....
whelly1985 on 7 Nov '11 said:
ha im with you mate, cant bloody wait for this game! as for people bitching about it- hey im used to it now, they must be bored in life to talk so much about a game they hate
Bezza89 on 7 Nov '11 said:
OXM I gave up on page 2. Why do you have to put articles in five pages, it's really annoying when you have so much space blank at the bottom.
Rant over.
*I wont be buying MW3 danhalen but as a gamer on a gaming website I like to comment about games believe it or not. *
Like how I find it baffling Activision have millions of dollars and sledgehammer games are using Google Street Maps to map levels. Surely they must go around on foot to get some quality photographs to attain the highest levels of detail. Admittedly they may say this in pages 3-5 but in principle I am against the practice.
Look forward to the review, I hope the campaign has some depth and length to it for when I get round to succumbing next year.
OXM ETboy on 7 Nov '11 said:
The pagination auto-cuts at about 500 words or something. All feedback appreciated.
Bezza89 on 7 Nov '11 said:
It's by no means a deal breaker, but on poor internet like where I live it's not worth loading the next page up.
comabob on 7 Nov '11 said:
Why was there so much backlash/hate for Black Ops' campaign? I thought it was pretty decent...
I wont be buying this though - burned out on COD's MP on MW1/WaW and from what ive seen this looks pretty much the same....
Although i will rent it for the OTT campaign - it may provide a mindlessly entertaining 5 hour break from skyrim before its sent back to Lovefilm.
danhalen74 on 7 Nov '11 said:
i get what you're saying Bezza totally, but we all know the pros and cons of COD by now and its generally the same things repeated ad nauseum, you make decent points and im all for that. i love it and always will as its the one game every year that at least 50% of my gamer friends all buy which means excellent drunken nights playing with loads of mates and having actual fun involving bullets to the face and / or arse. i quite fancied BF3, but not ONE of my gamer friend list peeps bought it and theres a big cross section of people i game with....i was quite surprised by that to be honest.
viva
Decent_Jam on 8 Nov '11 said:
Woah 5 pages? Longest article to date by about three pages! This is way too long for me to read but I'm sure it's interesting for MW3 fans, though if any of them will be reading it by now since they all ran down to the shops at midnight and have been playing ever since...
Possibly earlier posting of this and drip fed between other articles might have made it easier to digest? Just a thought.
Will be interesting to see what the feedback is about the game from those who get it, will be watching the thread in GD with anticipation.