Lots of improvements to story, sound, and other core features are included

Jun 6, 2014 07:41 GMT  ·  By

Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare, the next iteration in the first-person shooter series, will use a suite of new technologies and techniques for facial animations borrowed from the upcoming Avatar 2 movie made by James Cameron.

Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare was revealed to the world last month and quickly impressed many longtime fans of the series by presenting a futuristic take on the first-person shooter genre, while emphasizing a story with the main antagonist played by Hollywood actor Kevin Spacey.

Plenty of different gameplay details have been revealed since then but now, thanks to a new cover story from Edge magazine, we get to hear some more things about the technologies employed by developer Sledgehammer Games to make the new title.

First up, as we could admire in the reveal trailer that focused on a great monolog delivered by Spacey's character, Jonathan Irons, the facial animation system looks top-notch and the magazine explains that it uses technology and techniques borrowed from James Cameron's Avatar 2 movie.

What's more, this new system allows the team at Sledgehammer to deliver a "coherent, meaningful storyline" that focuses on warfare in the future but manages to keep things grounded without entering hard sci-fi mode in terms of technologies, weapons, or plot themes.

Advanced Warfare also promises to shine as regards the audio design, as it will boast not just great-sounding weapons that feel believable, but also realistic effects for those weapons when they hit enemies, targets, and many other things during the actual gameplay.

The aforementioned facial animation system also helps Sledgehammer reach another goal, that of photorealism in terms of gameplay, especially since the studio has a completely new rendering technology, a team of talented artists, and plenty of data sourced from the real world.

Sledgehammer Games was founded by some of the veterans who made Dead Space 1 at Visceral Games and Electronic Arts, so it's going to be interesting to see what the team can do now that it's in charge of its Call of Duty project.

The studio previously stopped working on Advanced Warfare back in 2011, so that it could help franchise founder Infinity Ward put the finishing touches on Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3, as the old studio was plagued with departures from veteran staff members, including co-founders Vince Zampella and Jason West.

Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare is set to debut on November 4 for the PC, PS3, PS4, Xbox 360, and Xbox One platforms. You can expect to get a direct gameplay demonstration at E3 2014 next week.