We sat down with Infinity Ward's lead animator, Zach Volker, in L.A. to discuss the recently announced Call of Duty: Ghosts.
During the interview he explained why the studio had decided against continuing the Modern Warfare strand of the series: "There was a lot of talk about Modern Warfare 4, there was a lot of discussions, a lot of team members wanted to go in that direction, but after a lot of discussion we ultimately we decided that Call of Duty: Ghosts was the direction that we wanted to go."
As most of you already know, Ghosts is set to feature on next-gen consoles, including the recently announced Xbox One. We asked Volker what it was like working with the new tech: "We push ourselves as hard as we can to make sure that we can eek out as much as we can of the hardware of whatever system we're on, so we can get the best looking game possible."
The new power of the next-gen consoles offers opportunity to improve immersion. The Infinity Ward man explained some of the differences we'll be able to notice: "There's a lot of different tech things that are going in. Some are what we would call "pillars"; and that would be SubDs, the displacement, the lighting... and some are a little on the subtle side; like the iris adjustment. But it's something you're going to feel, you know, we wouldn't do it if wasn't something noticeable."
For those worry that current-gen versions of the game will be limited when compared to their next-gen counterparts, the game's lead animator had reassuring words: "That was a really important point for us, to make sure that if you did purchase the game on a current-gen platform, you didn't feel that you were left out of something."