14 DAY TRIAL // The Infinity Ward team working on the new Call of Duty: Ghosts has already admitted that it is not using an entirely new game engine for the title but believes that the improvements it has made will persuade many players that the technology has been significantly improved.
Zach Volker, the animation lead at the studio, tells Edge that, “It’s a fine line when you define a new engine and augmentations to an engine. As we develop and we add features, at what point does it become a new engine? Because it’s impossible to develop a new engine from the ground up in a two-year cycle.”
The improvements to Call of Duty: Ghosts include displacement mapping, designed to add a 3D quality to all textures, and a new mechanic called sub-D, which makes characters look better when the camera comes close to them.
Volker adds, “You would need an army of 200 engineers. So we say, ‘OK, what are the things that are significant… Are those being upgraded in a significant way? All right, then, we’ve got a new engine on our hands’.”
The team at Infinity Ward also says that it has created cinema quality assets for Call of Duty: Ghosts in order to increase the overall visual fidelity.
Publisher Activision has shown a limited range of images from the new first-person shooter, but they are showing a radically changed game world, with a lot more vegetation for the player to navigate through and more of an emphasis on light and shadow.
The companies have not offered too much detail on the plot of the game, other than that it features a resistance force fighting for a defeated America.
Call of Duty: Ghosts will be launched on November 5 on the PC and on current-generation consoles, and versions for the Xbox One and the PlayStation 4 are set to arrive when the new devices are launched.