Grant Collier, president and head of Infinity Ward, spoke with Next-Gen about a variety of topics regarding Call of Duty 4, including Microsoft’s support, the birth of the game’s multiplayer and why the move to a modern-day setting was made.
First, Infinity Ward praised their time spent with Microsoft, and Collier reminisced about some minor rocky road encounters with Sony. The experience was smoother with Microsoft, mainly because of the lack of a language barrier, and the time spent with Sony wasn’t poor due to developmental problems or a clash of game design.
"With Microsoft we’ve got the advantage of them being an American company so our level of accessibility to them is much better than Sony. I’m not disparaging Sony is any way, but it’s just that they [Microsoft] speak English, we speak English…"
Infinity Ward is really pushing the ante when it comes to multiplayer. Considering Call of Duty 2 is still being enveloped by the multiplayer crowd, the developer is spending time to bring the game experience to the next level.
"We’ve really taken it to the next level, especially with multiplayer… This time we’ve had our lead multiplayer designer not have to do double duty – he’s been working for two years straight on multiplayer… First we added weapons customization, but we wanted to unveil weapon features through achievements…And then we started adding a lot of explosives like C4, RPGs and grenade launchers."
Lastly, when talking about a subject transformation, Infinity Ward simply got bored with a World War II environment. Also a nature progression towards a modern-day setting was evident after belting out several award-winning WWII games.
"I like the way that that sounds but modern day conflicts tend to be pretty one sided you know, one nation turning the other nation into a parking lot. We wanted to have the signature CoD gameplay where two equal forces are fighting in a seesaw battle, back and forth, and you don’t know who’s going to come out on top We totally dominated in the WWII genre and were like, ‘this isn’t fun anymore, let’s go play with some bigger people’."
Call of Duty 4 launches on November 5th for PC, Xbox 360 and PS3.
