Infinity Ward dev wants BF4 to succeed; talks about emotional aspect in campaign

Infinity Ward’s Mark Rubin sat down with GamesIndustry.BIZ and discussed how he hopes and wants competition to do better as well. When asked about BF4, he said he wants that game to succeed.

“It’s less antagonistic, from a developer’s side – sure marketing and stuff is all [about that] but on a developer’s side it’s like, ‘Oh, did you see that stuff they’re doing? That’s so cool!’ We could do something that’s like this and that and we get excited about seeing that kind of stuff. So from a developer’s side, it definitely pushes us [to do better]. But it pushes us in a – I don’t know if other studios feel this way – but I hope in a sort of camaraderie type sense. ‘Oh, those guys are doing awesome stuff. Let’s jack up our game.’ But not like two opposing teams. Rather, like the same team pushing in the same direction,” he explained.

“We all want gaming, in general to be awesome, because if gaming isn’t good, then we all lose our jobs in a sense. So for us, I think that the intellectual realization is we want everyone to be successful because if gaming is successful then we’re all successful.”

With Call of Duty: Ghosts, Infinity Ward has changed their vision in campaign to add a new emotional aspect as you have to play alongside your brother for most of the game.

“Every year, every time we made a new one it was the same thing [in terms of competition], and I like that. I think that’s the part that keeps us hungry, that keeps us… we don’t want to feel like the top dog, necessarily. We want to feel like it’s a struggle every time. We want to feel that almost ‘Rocky moment’, which is kind of a weird thing to say, but we do want to feel like that. We want to feel like we’ve got a huge challenge in front of us. We can’t just phone this in and ship a game and expect it to sell. We actually really have to do harder work this year than we did last year,” Rubin stressed.

Rubin also said that after the issues that happened following MW2, they’ve become a much better studio and have “future proofed” themselves.

“And from an industry standpoint games are getting harder to make and they’re taking bigger and bigger budgets and bigger teams, and so this gave us an opportunity to sort of retool some of the structure internally. I think we are better future proofed for making Call of Duty going forward. And we may or may not have done this if not for that [tumultuous] event. It forced our hand to go down that route, which in the long run turned out to be good for us. I think we are much more capable now of doing these big projects. We are only 125 people and it does take more than that to make these big games, so one of the things we learned from MW3 is how to work with outside studios. That’s something we’ve never done the past. The previous games were all very insular, and that’s not really possible now. Working with outside studios like Sledgehammer was a difficult transition but now we’ve gotten past that learning phase, and so on this game we’re getting a lot of help from other studios, Raven and Neversoft.”

SOURCE: GamesIndustry via DW247