Notes on Call of Duty 2 demo
Call of Duty was my introduction to World War 2 shooters; I missed Medal of Honor: Allied Assault since I was having too much fun with my Gamecube to keep up with PC gaming. I really enjoyed the experience, so news of a demo for the sequel was met by a speedy download, install and playthrough of it.
The original Call of Duty was notable for the clear focus of its design. It set itself a small number of achievable goals - most notably expanding the one-man-war aspect of MoH:AA to a team-based experience - and aimed to excel at them. “We were realistic about what we could do, and … we avoided feature creep.” notes Michael Boon, the game’s lead animator. This approach seems evident again in the sequel’s demo. Games like Brothers In Arms and Hidden and Dangerous illustrate the space there is for different approaches to the same subject matter, but the keyword for Call of Duty 2 is refinement rather than reinvention.
So what are those refinements?
The control layout has stepped away from several PC FPS standards and in doing so, moved towards greater suitability to a console gamepad (the game will see a near-simultaneous release on the Xbox 360). Single-button-press grenade throws are a welcome borrow from Halo; their increased accessibility like that means they see much greater use. Also familiar from Halo is only holding two weapons at once. The starting load out is a sub-machine gun and a rifle; the handling of these two guns is very distinct. In this way, the choice of what weapon to use is made more meaningful and interesting. (Or is it? The level design provided few opportunities where the choice was more complex than “if inside, use an SMG; if outside, use a rifle”.) The health system has seen significant changes. Significant enough to merit its own post, in fact.
The smoke effects deserve special mention; the effort that has gone into them definitely shows. The smoke grenades should prove an interesting addition too, though just this one level wasn’t really enough for me to judge their impact on the gameplay, since they seem like the kind of thing one has to get into the habit of using over the course of the game.
The new “Battle Chatter” system (the AI on both sides is very vocal about what it’s doing) is a welcome addition. This too has its roots in Bungie’s work, but I’d trace this concept’s lineage back to Thief’s enemy AI. The fundamental idea is that NPCs come across as a lot more intelligent (and hence convincing/immersive/etc) to a player if they are more vocal about their inner thought patterns. It doesn’t hurt the atmosphere either and you can use it to tell the player about both events and possibilities that might otherwise pass them by. I’m impressed that in Infinity Ward’s implementation, the characters doesn’t seem to repeat themselves to any noticeable (and hence immersion-damaging) extent.
The game’s handling of characters and story seems to be much the same as the original’s. I find this somewhat disappointing. It’s often said by developers of WW2 games that they want to invoke the same emotions in a player as Saving Private Ryan and its ilk do. “We wanted to get moments that brought out the same heartfelt emotions from people when they watched stories like Band of Brothers” says Boon of the first game. Really, what Call of Duty seeks to replicate (and succeeds at) is the opening quarter of an hour of Saving Private Ryan - the grand spectacle. By contrast, I’d say the “heartfelt emotions” are found in the moments of character-driven intimacy - stomach churning tussles of two men over one knife, for instance - which seem missing from both the original and this sequel. I guess that this comes down to their development philosophy. The quote in the first paragraph above about being realistic seems to me in some way parallel with the Ico team’s system of “Subtracting Design”. One interpretation of that would be “stick to the things you know you can do really well; if you try and tackle things that you can’t, you stand to harm your product with an inferior implementation”. (I particularly like this graph.) It’s disappointing that they’ve dodged an issue that I’d like to see as many developers as possible attacking, but it would be foolish of me to think worse of a game because it’s not something else. So I don’t! (But I can hope that for CoD3 they take a closer look at the problem.)
Finally, I found it curious how much the game appears to share in common with Time Crisis. Both are more or less comprised of a sequence of pitched battles fought from relatively static positions where you pop in and out of cover, take out the enemies that are themselves in fixed positions at various places on the screen and then move on to the next fixed position when it’s clear. I haven’t played either Brothers In Arms or Gears of War yet, but both talk about their “duck and cover” gameplay. The name evokes the same kind of idea to me, so it would certainly be amusing if the final destination of this ‘evolution’ of shooter gameplay ended up being a game that we’ve been playing since 1997.
