Polygon interviews Infinity Ward devs; talks return of IW, creative process, more
Polygon has interviewed Infinity Ward’s Mark Rubin and Zach Volker about the creative process on how Ghosts came about.
“We don’t start with Call of Duty or Modern Warfare, just: ‘What do we want to do’?” Rubin said of the latest attempt at the process. “And all the ideas go up on the board. It doesn’t have to be related to Call of Duty. It can be anything anybody wants. In the past, between games, we’ve made little mini-games. We did an isometric dungeon crawler thing, kind of cartoony, but it never got out.”
At first the team was focused on making another Modern Warfare game, but they realized the entire story was wrapped up in MW3.
Polygon also got the first details regarding Ghosts’s new audio engine:
The sound of gunfire in Ghosts will be affected by the player’s environment. Outdoors, shots ring out with these “big, long tails” that drag out, explains sound designer Dave Rowe, offering a reminder of the sound of a round firing. Inside, that shot echoes with reverb. The shape of the space and the materials within affect the sound further. A gun fired in a wide-open hangar sounds markedly different from the same gun fired inside a concrete tube
- The audio team took a week long trip to Arizona, where they recorded all the aspects of the audio coming in Ghosts
- Each sound is different – when a grenade explodes the metal around it rattles giving its location
Zach Volker also discussed about the dog’s creation into the game:
“We got a navy SEAL to come up with his dog and tell us about how dogs work with the teams and how they’re trained and the experiences they go through; the technologies they use,” Volker says. “Really, what came of it though, was the emotional connection, which really endeared us to the idea that we had to put a dog in the game. To hear someone saying ‘I’ll take a bullet for my dog’ that emotional tie-in was something we really wanted to try and capture with the game.”
Polygon has also discussed Infinity Ward’s new studio in Woodland Hills, California. Unlike Treyarch, Infinity Ward’s studio has never been on Activsion’s Santa Monica campus. They have their own, built from scratch, studio.
How did Infinity Ward find Stephen Gagan?
Gaghan’s involvement began when “one of the guys over at Activision met him at a baby shower,” according to Rubin. “They just started talking and he got really interested in the idea. They introduced us and we just really hit it off. The guy’s been amazing.”
Polygon also got inside looks at the new engine coming with Ghosts at Infinity Ward’s theater.
SOURCE: Read their full article Here. (image via Polygon as well)
