Kids the world over grow up fantasizing about being a soldier, and we aimed to let adults live out their childhood fantasies ( Call of Duty 4 is rated M). Modern weapons and tech are something that people like to see and play with. Because we already had a very sophisticated scripting language in our engine, we were able to implement and iterate on that variety quickly, and take advantage of the modern setting to shake up the gameplay, but still deliver a polished result. Instead, you have a huge variety of different types of low-intensity conflicts and special forces missions. Modern warfare is very different from more traditional warfare in that direct confrontations between huge armies are relatively rare. The modern setting inspires an enormous amount of gameplay variety. "Many members of the team came off Call of Duty 2 promising never to work on another WWII game." To facilitate that, we invented a war with several fronts, primarily involving a group splintered from the Russian army, with a secondary front in the Middle East. We really wanted to avoid referencing any current, real wars, and one aspect of the gameplay that we really didn’t want to change from previous titles was the idea of two large opposing forces with similar numbers and technology. Modern-day warfare is very emotional for people, which is both good and bad. One was Modern Warfare, and the other was a new project. We had a few ideas that we wanted to do and eventually settled on two. We don’t agree with some critics who say that WWII as a genre is dead, but we couldn’t muster the same passion for the subject that we had in our first three WWII games ( Call of Duty 1 and 2 and Medal of Honor: Allied Assault). WHAT WENT RIGHT 1) MODERN SETTING.Ĭoming off Call of Duty 2, we knew we wanted to do something different for our next game. As a game development experience, it seemed to go so smoothly that it was difficult to come up with five things that went wrong. We tried several different directions, many of which were failures, but the ultimate result was the best game any of us have ever worked on.
We don’t want to pigeonhole ourselves any more than we have to, and many members of the team came off Call of Duty 2 promising never to work on another WWII game. Call of Duty 4 was Infinity Ward's third Call of Duty game, and as such we approached it knowing we needed to do something fresh.