What good fortune that on the very weekend someone wanted to start writing about games and technology, rumors begin to circulate about this year’s upcoming Call of Duty title. I really don’t want to get into rumors on my absolute very first post but here we are. That said, the fact that we’re getting rumors this early feels troubling. Usually we don’t start seeing any kind of rumor or even early info until March at the earliest. Ok, it’s the end of February so I guess we aren’t that early but it definitely feels ahead of the norm. Still, it really gives this feeling that maybe Cold War isn’t doing so well internally.
According to this tweet by Victor Z, a known and very credible leaker, COD 2021 is going to be another World War 2 game. At first I was curious as to why World War 2. I mean sure, it’s where the franchise started and Sledgehammers last outing there, while it wasn’t exactly loved, wasn’t hated either. While I appreciate that Sledgehammer tried a little something different with the regiments, it just didn’t work and really didn’t fit with the create a class system. At least not at first. I know WW2 got a massive overhaul at the midway point but by then it was too late. I know at that point I was already done with it and so were a lot of other people, to where most people don’t even know it was changed.
Something I’ve been thinking about as we move on with Warzone and these sort of soft reboots and one of the reasons why I think they chose to continue on with World War 2: Let each studio have their time period. Let each studio tell their own story as well as maintain their individual style via their own yearly titles while bringing them all into one big Call of Duty universe. Warzone will be the flagship product going forward while it also acts like a bit of a bridge to each of the sub franchises which is fantastic. I mean if you pause the Cold War Season 2 gameplay trailer at 1:47 that is unmistakably Price. Season 1 of Modern Warfare 2019 mentions gas canisters that look they could be a modern day Nova 6 variant and then they’re promptly dropped for the rest of the year. It was featured in the campaign as well, though they never gave it a proper name. Gas is not mentioned again until Cold War where so far it seems to be the main focus of the seasonal content. We’re only coming up to Season 2 so that may still change but it doesn’t seem likely. Given those things, World War 2 would fit in here perfectly. Part of me can’t help but wonder if they’re going to bring back characters like Kravchenko and Reznov from World At War. While I’m sure there will be a World War 2 centered campaign, I cant help but wonder if at least the Warzone stuff is going to focus around Nova 6. It would make sense to connect those dots as it would lead nicely into Black Ops 1. Part of me also cant help but wonder if this was the game that Sledgehammer was supposed to make this year but got pulled and how that would’ve impacted Cold War’s Warzone story.
I’m curious as to how they’re going to integrate World War 2 weapons into Warzone considering everything is modern or close to it. Cold War weapons are recent enough that they can compete and sit alongside current weapons from Modern Warfare 2019. Initially I was having a hard time imagining these weapons sitting alongside each other but it could work. While these weapons are old, some of them can definitely be viable. After all the AK-47 is in all three eras. The question, from a design perspective, becomes how do you differentiate the AK in Modern Warfare 2019 from the AK in Cold War from the new and definitely going to be different AK in World War 2 2021? Also where do you end up placing something like the M1 Garand? Most likely in the DMR category as it’s not strong enough to be a sniper rifle but it’s definitely does not fit in the assault rifle category. Raven definitely has their work cut out for them and it’ll be intereserting to see how they decide to integrate and balance these weapons.
From a technical standpoint I really hope they use the new engine that’s used for Modern Warfare 2019 and Warzone. Its just seemingly more efficient and optimized. I mean it has to be if its going to power Warzone right? I mean think about the memory allocation and things that have to go on to track a hundred and fifty players on a map with a huge draw distance. It has to know and even predict where it is a player might go, stream in those testures accordingly, and then increase or decrease the level of detail on the fly. Granted, the graphics parts are happening on each individual player’s end but the entire map must be loaded into memory for it to be accessed. And not just that, it has to track player states across the enire session. And it has to run on hardware as far back as the original Xbox one and Playstation 4. So yeah, I’d say it may be big but its optimized. Warzone aside, to be completely honest, it’s just prettier as well. The engine uses modern lighting techniques that Cold War’s either just can’t do, or doesn’t do well. I mean look at the “god rays” in the Modern Warfare campaign. Or the reflections on the weapons in multiplayer, just to name some of the more obvious things. I mean the game is constantly running in infrared so that you can use night vision goggles whenever you want. All these things are rendered in real time. Cold War doesn’t seem to do that and while Cold War doesn’t necessarily look bad, its lack of these techniques makes it look… old. Dated. Even still, some of the textures look great. It’s not a bad looking game for the most part. And then there’s the issue of frames. In Modern Warfare I easily get 100 to 150 frames a second. Where as in Cold War, even with medium textures and things dialed back, I’m lucky to break 100 and then the game really starts to look bad. And we’re talking about an i7 7700k with a 2070 super. This is not exactly low end stuff. For reference this machine rocks Doom Eternal at max settings and maintains ~250 FPS. While Doom doesn’t have Ray Tracing at all, there is probably more happening on screen in Doom than there is any Call of Duty title, ever.
It just seems like Teryarch refuses to use the modern engines and upgrade along side Infinity Ward. When they do use the newest tech, their games are fine. They look and run great. The problem here is that they’ve basically been “highly modifying” the IW Engine since World At War, which used the original Modern Warfare’s IW 3 engine from 2007. In reality there’s nothing wrong with this in talented hands. After all, IW Engine is built on id Tech 3. Most of you will know it as Quake 3 Arena. From 1999. John Carmack was amazing at optimization, something that id continues to be known for today, long after his departure. Any decent programmer will tell you that if you add too much complexity to anything eventually it breaks. This is probably why Infinity Ward decided to take five years and rebuild their engine based around modern lighting techniques and made other optimizations. It shows in the raw frames per second and image quality. It seems like the complexity of all of Treyarch’s modifications to the IW 3 engine have finally caught up with them. Yeah they might’ve used tools from IW 8 (Modern Warfare 2019) but they’re using new tools on an old system and it looks like it finally broke. Let’s hope whatever comes this year from Sledgehammer, whether it is indeed “World War 2 2021” or something else, that they’ve learned what not to do and use the newest tools alongside the newest engine.
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