Infinity Ward’s ‘soft reboot’ of Modern Warfare includes an overhauled game engine that runs a simulation robust enough to model bullet penetration, which will allow you to shoot through certain kinds of walls and cover. And your enemies will be able to do the same thing.
In footage we’ve seen of the Townhouse mission, the player is shown shooting through a closed door, and that got us curious about the kind of destructability we’d be seeing in the final game.
“There are certain types of materials you will be able to break through,” explained Jacob Minkoff, Infinity Ward’s campaign gameplay director for Call of Duty: Modern Warfare. Minkoff says that while you’ll be able to break through flimsy materials like cardboard or hollow, wood-veneer doors, you won’t be able to do that with tougher materials like brick or solid wood.
But while you won’t be able to simply knock surfaces like that down, your bullets will penetrate them, and each gun in the game has a specific penetration value that will determine how far a round will travel once it strikes a surface in the level geometry.
“When you see the guy who gets shot through the wall in Townhouse, that kind of thing is everywhere in the game,” Minkoff said.
That aspect of the game opens up a host of tactical considerations during firefights, and it also created new challenges for Infinity Ward’s environmental designers.
“There are doors that you can’t shoot apart too, so we had to go and design a visual language for the doors that you can and can’t destroy,” said art director Joel Emslie. That work has paid off, he said, by adding an interesting layer of complexity.
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“I would say one of the best parts of the experience is the bullet penetration,” he said. “Just looking at soft cover and knowing that if you can shoot through it, so can your enemy – it’s a nice part of gameplay.”
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare launches October 25.