I thought MW2 was the open beta for MW3.....
From CVG:
Last week we published the first part of an interview with Glen Schofield, general manager of Modern Warfare 3 co-developer Sledgehammer Games, in which the former Visceral Games boss told us that multiple gameplay innovations will make the upcoming Call of Duty title the most accessible yet. Here, we quiz Schofield about the Call of Duty game engine, his review expectations for Modern Warfare 3, and his impressions of rival shooter Battlefield 3.
What do you make of criticism of the CoD game engine? Some have suggested it's starting to feel a little aged in comparison to some of its rivals?
Well I'll tell you one thing, I've worked on a lot of engines over my lifetime and spent a lot of time putting graphics in to them and this thing is Porsche. And what I mean by that is that it is stream-lined, everything in it is perfectly freaking clean. You can tell it's been worked on for years. It's easy to upgrade.
We worked with engines before that are like f***ing spaghetti. You can't work on a part and put it back in without messing with everything else. Modern Warfare 3's levels now are so much bigger than the old ones because they go more vertically, they have a bigger footprint and on top of that, higher fidelity, more textures and a lot more detail.
If you put Modern Warfare 2 next to Modern Warfare 3 you would see a huge difference. Look at all the character models, look at all the gun models, look at the reflections, look at the water. There is so much that we've added, so when someone says 'cut and paste', I don't even want to talk to them because they don't know. They just don't know. They have no idea.
And then on top of that you have what we added to the audio engine. Then there's a lot of stuff under the hood. People don't think about this but when you make your tools better and you can iterate twice as many times, you make the game better. So instead of going, 'Well, I'd really like to move that guy over an inch, that would actually make it better.' And people going, 'Ah, that's a pain in the arse. I'm not going to move him'. Imagine multiplying that over 200 times, 300 times, a 1,000 times over the course of the game. By not moving something, you're really affecting quality. With the tools we've added, maybe we can move them. The more you can iterate, the better the game will be.
I've said this before - I'm not shipping an engine, I'm shipping a game. So that's why I'm going to talk about the game. You can talk about your engine all you want. It's not fun.
Will the game quality and support be consistent across all platforms? Some PS3 and PC Call of Duty players have felt a bithard done by on previous occasions?
Absolutely, and it is. We've been developing on PS3 for over a year. I do get tweeted saying 'We haven't seen any PS3 screens'. What happens is we start developing on 360 and at some point we switch. We switch to the PS3 and you make sure that that's running at 60 frames a second, the graphics look freaking great, and we play both. They're in parity. Every place is exactly the same. I'm not sure what the issues were with the last one, but there's nothing to worry about with this one.
Did the work you did on your initial, third person Call of Duty project go to waste or did you adapt any of the ideas from that and bring them over to Modern Warfare 3? And what specifically is Sledgehammer's mark on Modern Warfare 3?
And also polish. I would rather polish three mechanics to a 95 than have five at 70. Infinity Ward agree with that. There were so many philosophies that we agreed on. Sometimes our processes were better so we used ours, sometimes theirs were. I really think the fans are going to get the benefit of two really good teams and best practises from both together.
It'll be interesting to see if it feels like an Infinity Ward game or if it feels like there's something different in there this time.
Yeah, an Activision executive said: 'I think we've achieved exactly what we wanted. It feels like a Call of Duty game, but there is something intangible that I can't put my finger on. There's an influence in there for the positive.' And that's it for me. That's what I wanted, to make a difference without you really knowing what the heck it is.
Studio collaboration seems to be becoming more of a trend when it comes to developing big annual franchises. Beyond the Gun Game and One in the Chamber modes, has Treyarch been consulted or offered any other inspiration for MW3?
With the Theatre mode, we realised they had some issues with it, so we wanted to correct those in ours. [Treyarch boss] Mark Lamia is a friend of mine. But we really didn't talk too much. He's really supportive and we needed that in the beginning. We didn't know how good we would be with this engine, and everybody came back and he especially said, 'You guys have learned and picked up this engine faster than any team I've ever seen. You've gotten to a place it took Treyarch two years to get to.' So there wasn't a lot of discussions in terms of the game but there was encouragement because we were new.
Call of Duty continues to grow each year, with last year's Black Ops outdoing Modern Warfare 2 to become "the biggest entertainment launch ever". Black Ops has gone on to sell about 25 million copies. Do you think MW3 can top its launch and rival its sales in the long-term?
I hear things like it could, but I'm more focused on quality. I want to try and entertain as many people as possible, but I also want to make sure it's of the highest quality. Right now, I'm more anxious about the Metacritic scores.
They're arguably different types of games, but Modern Warfare 3 and Battlefield 3 share the same genre, and EA's made clear its intention to wrestle market share from Call of Duty. Do you view Battlefield 3 as a particularly dangerous competitor for Modern Warfare, or is just one big game among many others?
My competition is Modern Warfare 2. It always has been and if you think back two years ago when we were starting on the project I didn't know anything about Battlefield. I started hearing stuff about it maybe five or six months ago, news coming out. I never got a chance to play it until we got the beta a little while ago. So as far as a competitor goes, by the time we saw anything of it, the window to make changes was closed.
Let's just say that I still use Modern Warfare 2 as my competitor. I need to make sure that the millions of people that played Modern Warfare 2 will pick up this game, notice that it's better, notice that it's bigger, that there's more in it, that there's more polish, all that stuff. That's what I'm concerned with - this community.
Was an open beta considered for Modern Warfare 3?
Someone asked me that the other day. This game is so big between the campaign, the Spec-Ops and the multiplayer, there was so much work to do that I don't know whether it hit anyone's mind or not. We had XP and XP was in itself a way for 1,000s of people to play the game and for us to look over their shoulder and see how they were doing and how they liked it and that was really good.
I was looking at the Metacritic scores for the 360 versions of the last few Call of Duty games earlier. Modern Warfare is at 94. World at War is at 84. Modern Warfare 2 is at 94 and Black Ops is at 87. What's your target - are you confident of matching those 94 scores?
If I got a 94 I would kiss you. It would be really nice to have a nine in front of the score, but really the truth is: can we make those millions of fans happy? Can we make them feel that we made a worthy successor to one of the biggest and best games ever. I don't know how you quantify that but I think if people shake my hand and say "Nice job" that will be worth more than the Metacritic score.
The Sun
When something gets as big as Call of Duty, it kind of becomes a cool thing to hate on it.
Yeah it sure does, doesn't it? It turned quickly. Modern Warfare 2 was a media darling. Modern Warfare 3, nothing really changed. Well, some people left...
Do you ever worry that that kind of vocal, negative sentiment is going to cross over to or be reflected by the people that write for those audiences? People always like to back the underdog and want to see the market leader dethroned.
I hope that the people writing will dig in to the story and find out if that's really true or if that's the vocal minority. I look at my tweets and I get the same three or four guys who are just negative every night. They're so vocal that their name pops up all the time, and I have to go back every once in a while and say, 'No, I've got 1,000s of people following me, these guys are just really vocal'. So I think the press needs to do, and they probably are doing the same thing, is just see how many people really are vocal about it. There's always going to be haters and they are the loudest ones. If they start writing about it and it's not true, I think people will see that. I actually think that's happening with Battlefield a little bit right now. I'm starting to see more negative stuff about Battlefield 3 based on the beta. What they're writing about now would be based on the true game, not like smoke and mirrors or something.
Is as the original Sledgehammer project cancelled or just put on the backburner?
We'll probably cancel it. They gave us the choice of: do you want to work on Modern Warfare 3, or do you want to continue working on this? And we really liked that. We liked what we were doing. It third person, probably set at a time that might have niched it too much. I bet that if we had kept going, within a month or two I probably would have switched the time period, but kept the gameplay. It had some really cool stuff. Are you going to go on to work on your own project after Modern Warfare 3?
I think that we will work alone on our next project. This game has allowed both Infinity Ward and Sledgehammer Games to hire, and we hired really strong teams, both of us. We needed to come together on this one, but since then we've both grown, we're both over 100 people now. Initially we weren't fully functional because we had to learn a new engine. Now we have, I think the best thing that could happen for Activision would be for us to both go off and make our own game. Whether that's a Call of Duty game or not is up in the air. I plan to continue working on Call of Duty.
