Infinity Ward had the option to make Ghosts next-gen only

When Infinity Ward started development on Call of Duty: Ghosts, Activision gave them the option to make the game a next-gen only, and if they wanted, have another studio port the game down to current-gen. But, Mark Rubin said that the studio wanted to make all 5 versions.

Mark Rubin: Activision. Activision came to us and were like, okay, next-gen is launching within your time frame. Do you guys want to work on next-gen and have someone else do current-gen – a port? Do you want to work on current-gen and have someone port the opposite way? It didn’t take us more than three seconds to decide we absolutely wanted to do both.

We want the next-gen title to be really strong and good and stand on its own, and we wanted current-gen to be better than any current-gen game we’ve done in the past. So we instantly said, we want both. We want to do both. We got this. And then we looked at the work and were like, oh god.

It was almost a perfect storm. We are doing current-gen and next-gen, plus PC. We have a new story, a new world, new characters. That’s a whole lot of new thinking you have to do, and new designing and a lot of new work. Then on top of that we have a new engine. Then on top of that we have a whole new mode, Extinction.

SOURCE: EuroGamer