Call of Duty: Ghosts is out now; here’s our Call of Duty: Ghosts review.
Infinity Ward have been making Call of Duty games literally since their inception, when the team behind Medal of Honor: Allied Assault swapped EA for Activision and had to think up another name for their new WWII shooter.
That was more than 10 years ago. Call of Duty has sustained Infinity Ward throughout the decade since – a decade that has lately seen the walkout of Team Westpella and about 50 senior staff, no less. No wonder, then, that they want to hold onto it.
But executive producer Mark Rubin insists: when it came to conceptualising Ghosts, they did have a choice. Infinity Ward didn’t have to make another Call of Duty game.
“We don’t get a chance when making a game to think about the next one until we are done actually making that first game,” Rubin told MCV.
“So when we finished Modern Warfare 3, we had this big brainstorming session that lasted for weeks. Everybody gets to come up with ideas of what we want to do, not just what game we want to do, but moments in games.”
This mammoth session, however, yielding a surprising result: “We all really knew we wanted to continue making Call of Duty.”
“We could have done something else,” said Rubin. “But we wanted to make Call of Duty and we wanted to create a new universe, or a new story at least. We wanted new characters and new experiences.”
More CoD, then. But Rubin insisted that the developers aren’t taking the easy road with their new game.
“The easy thing would have been – as we had finished the arc of Modern Warfare 1, 2 and 3 – to start a new arc within that same universe,” he explained. “That was the first step. But due to a lot of the changes we wanted to make with this new world, it really dictated out that we needed to make something that wasn’t Modern Warfare.”
Would you like to see Infinity Ward make a thing that isn’t CoD? What would it even look like?