Modern Warfare 2 Relies on Animation

Modern Warfare 2 is now out and estimates are saying that millions of gamers will be playing it before the end of the year. The first game in the series, which was released in late 2007, has set the bar pretty high in terms of graphics and image realism and Modern Warfare 2 is set to offer a whole new experience, taking the “being there” feeling to a whole new level.

But, surprisingly, the secret to delivering incredible graphics is not just creating models of the characters and textures with bigger and bigger polygon counts but actually using animations to depict a wide variety of movements for all the living beings in the game world.

Joel Emslie, who is the lead artist working on Modern Warfare 2, told Gamasutra that “First and foremost, it's getting animation right. The human eye picks up on everything. It doesn't need very many pixels of movement to realize that something looks fake, so the movement is first and foremost.”

He believes that Modern Warfare 2 is not a quantum leap in terms of graphics but that “We've improved the way we make faces. We've really been tightening the screws with what we've been doing this whole time on the PC, Xbox 360, PS3 - just really stepping it forward each time we make a new game and learning from all the mistakes from last time. But to set it in reality, the first thing is the animations, getting it to move right.”

In other words, simply making characters look good is not a great idea. The player needs to be immersed in the videogames and a movement from an arm that does not look right can undo the work done by artists who have carefully created every detail of a character. Moments like the nuclear bomb blast in the first Modern Warfare would have never had that emotional impact were it not for the good animation of the game.