You mentioned you expanded on the scenes. How was the process of taking the MoCap that was already done from the original fps game Collectibles and bringing it into this game? Did you have to redo any of it or could you basically just drop it in, add new textures and it work?
This engine features a lot of the same functionality that you can find in modern CODs. So staring with those layouts and starting with the gameplay and the timing, our engineers created a system that would record controller inputs and it did a comparison between how much time it took to move from start to run, how much time it took for you to press a button and the action actually take place on the 360 and compared that to what it was on the Xbox One and Playstation 4. So I can tell you that down the hundreth of a second we are identical in timing to things like ADSs and things like mantling. We’ve also made improvements to them so they also look more modern and they act and behave as gamers today would expect them to. For the mantling we added animations that instead of just running up to something, pressing the button, then playing an animation to mantle over, and then picking up and running again. You can now run to it and if you press the button you can now plant your hand on the object you’re trying to mantle, crawl over it like you would in a modern game, and you can keep moving. The timing is exactly the same, but the visuals are the upgrade we did in that regard. The ADSing for the sniper is a really good example in that we used to have an animation that moved about a quarter of the way and it just popped to a screen overlay.
I agree that that’s classic, however, when we popped that in there it did not look good. It really looked dated and it didn’t feel like it belonged in this modern space with this game, especially with all the other improvements we made along the way. So we figured out what the timing was for the ADS and decided we could not deviated from that in our limits. Then we created the animation that moves up and it feels more natural because you connected to your weapon a little bit more and at the last minute if you noticed it, it still pops. We felt that that was an important part, but we ended up doing more of an animation into that. So those are just a couple of different ways we took that.
Season 4 has been one of the most content-heavy seasons for Modern Warfare 3 and Warzone , bringing a ton of additional content to both games. Week 7 adds even further content for Season 4, including the 6v6 Mosh Pit playlist for the G3T_H1GH3R gamemode. Much like previous weekly events, Week 7 also brings its own roster of weekly challenges that allow players to acquire another Aftermarket P
We have a really good relationship with Infinity Ward so we worked with them throughout. Challenging? Yeah it was challenging, because we all have perceptions of what we think it looked like and if you go back it looks pretty good even today. We knew that we needed to enhance the visuals and we did that with adding contrast and tone, making sure the hues and separations felt more natural in the space and for ‘Shock and Awe’ that’s actually a great level to talk about. Some of the additions we made to it to make it stand out, but not change the narrative in any way, was that you remember when the helicopter is flying out and the co-pilot gets sucked out at the end and he falls out. That is really a cool moment, and we asked ourselves what can we do to add a little more emotion to the scene? What we did is we created a lot of these first person animations.
I’ve speculated over the past week whether a remaster of previous Call of Duty titles is necessarily a bad thing. But whether Activision’s late (it has to be said) jumping on the remaster band-wagon should be regarded as universally “lame”, the truth is, I don’t see it as something objectively bad. If anything — and this is coming from someone who’s always open to discussing the many, troublesome issues with Call of Duty as a model, let alone as an iteration-by-iteration video game — I find the idea, notably interesting. For a series that has shifted from World War 2 to modern war and now to future warfare, could this be an early sign of where the series may end up turning in later releases further down the line? Yes you can argue Ghosts tried a return to a contemporary-ish aesthetic to counter the ever-growing futuristic direction Black Ops & Advanced Warfare brought forth.
It was far more complicated than that. So the methods of which MoCap is captured have changed significantly in the last nine years, almost as much as game engines have changed. We are very fortunate at Raven to have a Mocap studio on site as well as facial capture and a lot of other technologies that help us punch this. I won’t say that we weren’t able to use any of the animation data, because i believe that we used a lot of it and then added detail and more natural movement to scenes, but we did a lot of new MoCap. Some scenes we just couldn’t get the data to line up right and the timing felt off, and it wasn’t because we changed the timing it’s because the systems had fundamentally changed and we needed to make sure that that still felt right. So our animation team and our MoCap team have done a ton of work and we’re very proud of that work. So yeah I would say it wasn’t an easy thing to just take it and ‘copy and paste’ it and you’re good. There was definitely a lot of time put into that.