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defiant007
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http://www.gamespot.com/pc/action/c...;img;1&mode=previews&tag=stitialclk;gamespace
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2011-05-26-call-of-duty-modern-warfare-3-preview
http://www.vg247.com/2011/05/26/modern-warfare-3-shown-in-london-shots-impressions/
These previews are quite interesting. The majority of it is the usual PR and marketing hyperbole I have come to expect from journalists who do not want to be frozen out of exclusive access to pre-release information, but peppered throughout each one are several negative insinuations which I do not recall seeing any previews of previous CoD games.
Maybe I am imagining it, but perhaps reviewers are either consciously or unconsciously signaling a weariness of the CoD franchise.
In case you hadn't heard the news, there's a new Call of Duty game coming this year in the form of Modern Warfare 3. Picking up immediately after its 2009 predecessor, Modern Warfare 3 will tell the story of US Delta Force operatives and British SAS forces teaming up against the Russian ultranationalists who have made the critical mistake of invading their home turf. Indeed, battles will be waged in both New York and London--among other locales--as you seek to deal with the Russian threat using a little tactic called "any gun you can get your hands on." Activision was kind enough to demo a slice of both the New York and London sections of the game at a recent press event leading up to this year's Electronic Entertainment Expo, so let's get into the nitty-gritty of what you can expect from the latest installment in what has become the biggest video game franchise on the market.
Well, speaking of markets, your first goal in the New York demo is to carve your way through war-torn Lower Manhattan in order to make it to the Stock Exchange building. This level paints Manhattan as a city in ruins, with overturned cars filling the streets, massive sections of the road sunk into the ground, and buildings teetering on the edge of collapse. In true Call of Duty fashion, you're moving through a tightly scripted pathway without much opportunity to veer off and explore at your own leisure. In this level alone, you go from outside on Broad Street, up into a neighboring building overlooking the Stock Exchange's familiar oversized American flag, and then down onto the floor of the Exchange with its familiar circular computer pods. Eventually you and your team make it up onto the roof of the Exchange, deal with some bad guys camped across the way on nearby rooftops, and then jump into a helicopter for an on-rails turret sequence that will be well familiar to anyone who has spent much time with the franchise thus far.
There didn't seem to be an awful lot of gameplay additions in this particular demo. The main character was using a gun with a special new attachment that could be swapped from a red dot sight to a magnified ACOG sight with a simple twist of the wrist, which will probably add some welcome flexibility for those who would prefer one gun to deal with both close and distant enemies. Then there was another gun that we couldn't quite make out, but it appeared to have the form factor of a sniper rifle with the ability to lob grenades using a pinpoint, heavily magnified sniper rifle zoom. But aside from that, it was the same combat familiar to anyone who played Modern Warfare 2, right on down to a section where you man a predator drone strike from up in the sky.
In fact, this New York demo was an oddly muted one compared to the direction the series seemed to be heading in with Modern Warfare 2. There was no swelling music until near the end, little communication between squadmates, and no signs of city life to speak of outside of the two sides going about their warring business. Perhaps it's that codevelopers Infinity Ward and Sledgehammer want to stay more true to the surgical Delta Force tactics, or maybe it's that a demolished Manhattan level doesn't carry the same impact coming on the heels of Crysis 2, but all we know is that for a series known for increasing levels of spectacle and "wow" moments, this particular level didn't offer much of either.
Thankfully, the London level shown immediately afterward did offer some of that spectacle that we've come to expect from Call of Duty. This level begins with a pilot cruising above London using the familiar infrared vision of an AC-130 gunship. But quickly enough, you jump into the shoes of an SAS operative down on the ground in what turns out to be a rainy industrial neighborhood of London under a gloomy nighttime sky. The SAS begin by quickly and quietly moving through a dilapidated building, taking out enemies with silenced submachine guns. Eventually the fight spills out into a parking lot, then into a construction yard, and eventually down a large ramp descending into some sort of underground tunnel.
But it's revealed a moment later that this is no regular underground construction site. In fact, you've somehow fought your way down into the tunnel of the London Underground. (Did we mention this level is cheekily titled "Mind the Gap"?) The bad guys you're chasing hop onto one of the trains on the Tube, but your squad is just a few seconds late, so you have to make do with jumping onto a flat-bed truck and driving after them. In a high-speed chase leading through darkened tunnels, you're on the back of the truck shooting the Russians in the train, occasionally veering out of the way of oncoming trains that are little more than a flash of blinding light in these dark tunnels. At one point, you even pass through a crowded station with dozens of civilians waiting on the train platform--more to the point, civilians who must be soiling themselves at the sight of a speeding train being tailed by an equally speeding truck, which are firing shots at one another. Not quite the usual rush-hour Tube ride.
Things soon get worse, as the train you're chasing overturns and starts rolling sideways through the tunnels, knocking down the pillars and support beams as it careens sidelong through the dimly lit underground. It's an impressive sight that you can't help but stare at in awe, right up until the moment that your truck also manages to lose control and send you toppling down onto the ground. And just as that happens, the game logo pops up, and it's demo over.
At the end of the day, this really was a tale of two demos. The London level was a thoroughly entertaining encapsulation of the spectacle and excitement that people play Call of Duty games for, while the New York level was a strangely flat experience that didn't really grab us. Then again, every game needs varied pacing, and the Call of Duty series has practically mastered the art of roller-coaster action, so perhaps this particular slice of the New York campaign is more of a downtime moment designed to complement the dramatic spikes soon to follow. At any rate, it's still early yet, and there's still plenty of Modern Warfare 3 left for us to see. We'll be sure to report back as we find out more leading up to the game's November 8 release.
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2011-05-26-call-of-duty-modern-warfare-3-preview
So, where were we?
Oh yes. Russia has invaded the continental United States. An armada has arrived on the shores of the eastern seaboard, battles have been fought around strip malls and fast food joints, and gunfights have torn up the White House lawns.
All of which means that Modern Warfare 3 isn't just the first Call of Duty Infinity Ward now in conjunction with Sledgehammer Games has made since the legally complex departure of West and Zampella. It's the first Call of Duty Infinity Ward has made that begins at a point that has no connection to any kind of reality. The franchise has kicked itself loose from Planet Earth one plot twist, one nuke launch, and one snow-covered skidoo chase at a time. The series that was once so eager to tell the story of the everyday Joes at the sharp end of each global conflict is now heading towards what entertainment historians might refer to as the Late Brosnan period of its creative development.
That said, it's not looking half bad off the back of it. A recent reveal of the single-player campaign arguably not that close to being the most important part of a COD release shows that the franchise's spectacle engines are in robust Late Brosnan health. Watching developers walk through brief and enormously loud sections of New York and London levels suggests that the guiding principle for the latest game has been More of the Same, and Bigger Helpings. That means more set-pieces, bigger explosions, and another thick layer of scripting just to make sure that every last element goes according to plan. It's Call of Duty: Shut Up and Hang Onto Something, and if you're weary at the prospect of funfair ride mechanics enemies that won't die until the script renders them vulnerable, barrels which will explode wedged in with barrels that are just scenery it's worth remembering that we're promised more Spec Ops and more Multiplayer too. Come release day, there should be lots of twitchy tactical freedom in the box, ready to work alongside the on-rails carnage of story mode.
It should be a game of extremes, then. A trip into the Lower Manhattan level certainly hints that, come November, you'll be moving through a single-player campaign in which almost nothing is left to chance. Every waypoint marker leads you past pretty destruction, each plot beat calls for bespoke - possibly one-off - animations from your team-mates as they nervously lean against walls or tap each other on shoulders to issue frantic signals. As a player, it's weird to have this much care and attention lavished on you: this is a game that never sends you up a ladder and onto a rooftop unless you're going to glimpse a bomber going overhead at just the right second as you emerge, and which will never let a pranged chopper lazily spiral down from the sky unless it will knock against your chopper as it falls, sending you into a world-jumbling spin until your pilot rights everything at the last moment.
The developers have done an excellent job of ensuring that this clockwork world at least looks like chaos. Between the echoing skyscraper battlements of Wall Street, there's a real sense of being in the middle of a massive conflict, even as the game's unshakable pacing mechanisms dole out a mere handful of enemies for you to fight at each turn. New York's occupied by the Russian army at this point in the campaign, leaving you on a mission to trek through Manhattan, gathering delta team stragglers, and fighting into a wind that's already thick with ash and burning wreckage: crazy as it seems, the design renders it fairly convincing.
We've been here before, of course most recently with Crysis 2 but COD still manages to make New York feel like an event. On your way to a rendezvous with other resistance fighters, you'll battle the enemy both in the streets themselves, pinned-down by gun trucks and hunkering behind chunks of concrete as the metallic chattering of weaponry fills the air, and inside shattered buildings, working your way through offices, once plush, now carefully trashed, taking it one door, one artfully exposed staircase, and one flashbang at a time.
You may not have a great deal of control over how to approach many of the encounters at least not in the sections Activision's currently unveiling but Modern Warfare 3 certainly mixes up its target ranges for you fairly regularly. Enemies pop up first in the foreground and then in the distance, while the campaign sends you through the trading floor of Stock Exchange where you have to inch from one piece of cover to the next (it's a close-up, low visibility battle that brings back plenty of memories of the first Modern Warfare's TV station assault) one minute, and then upwards onto the overhead gantries to whittle down the ranks of enemies spawning below the next.
It mixes up weapons too Manhattan includes everything from standard assault rifles to the AT4 and that lovely grenade launcher - and keeps the objectives ticking over nicely. Meet the team, flank the Russian forces, head to the rooftops and take out a radar jammer. After that, there's just time for a quick and tightly choreographed buzz through the skyscraper canyons of the island while you take down a few rival whirlybirds. Up here you can see that New York's a wreck, but it's nowhere near as artful or meticulous a wreck as Crysis 2's take on the city. Instead, texture and detailing has been sacrificed for a rock solid 60 fps, and it's a trade that makes a lot of sense. This is a busy world that moves past you at great speeds, and it would be a crime to see it halt or stutter.
London, meanwhile, offers a change of scenery, but refuses to release the firm grip on pacing. Dropped into the shoes of a gruff Statham type named Burns, you're on a night mission in dreary British rain, sent in with your team to take a peak at a supply depot where the Russians are moving something unpleasant around in a convoy of vans.
The level kicks off in a semi-Dickensian warren of alleyways and dead ends as your squad moves into the facility, clearing out buildings before heading to the target. There are plenty of people for you to shoot with your silenced P90 "silenced" is a relative term in the COD fun park, mind but the real pleasure lies in seeing your partners neatly taking out their targets around you, too: sniping through windows from a distance, or killing up-close. It's a beautiful piece of atmospheric theatre, and the kind of thing that COD games excel at.
Once the mission turns hot (I felt a little like Statham myself just using that term) it's back to painstakingly-crafted panic, as you race through an industrial estate ducking bouncing concrete pipes that have come loose before leaping into a pick-up manning the turret, obviously to chase after a runaway tube train. The game's budget is being spent everywhere you look before a truly mesmerising crash, you zip through stations where individually animated commuters wait on the platforms, and out into a huge rain swept skybox, dominated by Canary Wharf - but while it's a classic Modern Warfare moment, it can feel, just a little, like something Nathan Drake should be doing rather than the hardened realists of the SAS.
COD just can't resist the lure of cinema, then, even when subsequent playthroughs will potentially mean that the cinema you're getting is the bank truck robbery scene from Groundhog Day. One, two, three, dog bark. Five, six, seven, air strike. It's elegantly done though, and the best scripted sequences out there, like the building collapse from Uncharted 2, and the plane hijacking that caps the first Modern Warfare, proves that there's a real Time Crisis thrill to memorising spawn patterns and tightening your racing line through a level. What's more, it's hardly easy to pull off, either, as Homefront, with its cut-price theatrics, has already made clear.
Talking of rivals, is Battlefield 3, Modern Warfare 3's big competitor this Christmas, likely to make the same choices? Will it match this campaign, or counter it, exchanging scripted thrills for something a little less linear? Can't wait to find out: November is going to be pretty interesting.
http://www.vg247.com/2011/05/26/modern-warfare-3-shown-in-london-shots-impressions/
Rather than waiting for E3, which by the looks of it is hardly going to be short on fucking HUGE announcements, Activision has decided to show the next instalment in the unstoppable Call of Duty franchise a few weeks ahead of time. In a North London studio on Monday, Infinity Wards Robert Bowling and Sledgehammer Games Glen Schofield took to the stage together to demonstrate
Of course, Modern Warfare is particularly interesting this year because of the ex-Infinity Ward execs versus Activision wrangling thats been plastered all over this and every other website since the middle of last year. Then theres the collaboration with Sledgehammer Games, which also raises an eyebrow. What direction will these two studios take the series in? Are we going further down the setpiece-heavy action movie Modern Warfare 2 route, or will this new title reclaim the tension and relative seriousness of the original Modern Warfare?
On the evidence of this reveal demonstration, were definitely looking at the former. What we saw was heavily, heavily scripted, all-action setpiecing but good lord, these are some impressive setpieces. As the latest trailer shows, Modern Warfare takes place in cities all over the world, from Paris to New York, London and, from the looks of it, Berlin. We saw what looks to be the opening level, set in the Big Apple, before being transported to Canary Wharf for a second mission.
All-out war
Modern Warfare 3 picks up immediately after the end of MW2, with the world in a state of all-out war. The level opens as the player pulls himself out of a crashed helicopter on a New York street amid the familiar, cacophonous noise of gunfire and explosions, as a nearby sergeant screams at him to get out of the wreckage. Our first glimpse of the city is a vertical view up to the sky, the sun blooming between skyscrapers as the helicopter door is forced open then were chucked some ammunition and told to make our way to the stock exchange.
As our demonstrator fights his way through the streets and buildings of New York, recognisable landmarks like the Crown building and the stock exchange itself stand out a mile. Enemies take cover behind boardroom couches, jewelery store counters shatter under gunfire as he sprints out into the street from a department store, and a copter, broken blades still spinning, is lodged in the side of a skyscraper.
This, along with the dirtied American flags drooping over the wreckage and the blown-out cop cars littering the streets, is powerful imagery, designed (rather like Homefronts) to get right at the heart of Americas power complex. Its all narrow street combat, as befits New Yorks close, vertiginous streets and grid-like layout.
Powerful imagery
On the roof of the stock exchange, our demonstrator uses a Reaper drone to clear the rooftops around of enemies before leaping onto a fast-departing extraction helicopter. What follows is a ridiculously high-octane air battle, with the player holding onto the mounted machine gun as the pilot waves around towering skyscrapers, evading the missiles of pursuers.
We couldnt help but notice at this juncture that the actual buildings, despite being hit with missile after missile from this airborne firefight, displayed no progressive damage not so much as a bullet-hole. At one point in particular, when the fight centered around a skyscraper still under construction, the plastic netting, steel constructs and random materials seemed entirely unbothered by the constant stream of bullets, until a helicopter crashed into it and everything promptly ignited.
Eventually, our own copter was hit, sending it spinning downwards and bashing into buildings whilst our demonstrator hung out of the door by his fingertips. Its worth mentioning at this point that MW3 is as good-looking as youd expect, the lack of dynamic destruction notwithstanding. Schofield mentions that its running at a constant 60fps, which is not difficult to believe.
The next mission is set in Londons Canary Wharf, and starts out as a covert operation before exploding into a full-on assault on the docks. This being London, its rainy, dark and atmospheric the tall buildings of Canary Wharfs skyline tower blearily in the background, their lights blurred through the damp.
Theres support from helicopters, whose sweeping searchlights cut through the gloom to illuminate enemies (who dont seem to have much of an instinct for cover or self-preservation, incidentally, but in this series, they never have.) Sniper lasers, too, penetrate the darkness this is hardly a one-man war.
Its the conclusion of this section that provides the demos most impressive set-piece of all, a chase after tube train full of enemies down the sprawling tunnels of the London Underground. Manning the mounted machine gun on a truck, youre in hot pursuit, veering wildly out of the way of oncoming trains and trying to avoid mowing down the fleeing passengers as you zoom past a platform.
You can catch a glimpse of what happens next in the trailer the tube train explodes, flies off the rails, and proceeds to demolish what looks like half of the structural support of the Underground. It really is a hell of a spectacle.
Its interesting to see FPS developers moving en masse towards urban combat as opposed to the dusty desert-style battlefields that have been obsessing them for the past few years. Theres an undeniable black thrill to seeing such iconic symbols of modernity torn apart by war, to fighting in a setting thats familiar.
The battle ahead
Heres the question were all thinking about, though: is it as good as Battlefield 3? DICEs shooter definitely had the more jaw-dropping reveal demonstration, showing astonishing destructibility, tense pacing and serious graphical grunt that the Modern Warfare 3 demo did not match but then it was running on a PC the size of a Shetland pony. What Modern Warfare 3 shows us is gameplay running on a console, locked at 60fps Battlefield 3 isnt possibly going to be able to do that.
This MW3 demo also had the edge in terms of sheer full-on sensory assault stuff never stopped happening for a second. (Given that Modern Warfare 2 knew how to change the pace up at least a little, though, we can assume that the finished game will give us a little more time to catch our breath.)
This is the first year in a long time where weve had real, tooth-and-nail competition at the top of the shooter ladder. Activision has a lot more to worry about here than they did with Medal of Honor last year. When Infinity Ward/Sledgehammer and DICE start putting their multiplayer cards on the table, this is going to escalate into an all-out war for the shooter-fan dollar.
And lets remember, thats extremely good for us. It will drive creativity and change in a genre that, lets be honest, hasnt really been known for either of those things in a while. Its going to be an interesting year.
These previews are quite interesting. The majority of it is the usual PR and marketing hyperbole I have come to expect from journalists who do not want to be frozen out of exclusive access to pre-release information, but peppered throughout each one are several negative insinuations which I do not recall seeing any previews of previous CoD games.
Maybe I am imagining it, but perhaps reviewers are either consciously or unconsciously signaling a weariness of the CoD franchise.
