Previews// Call of Duty 3 (360/PS3/Wii/PS2/Xbox)

"It's one of those things that people might not notice - and if they don't, that's probably good. It's like good music, good audio, that if it's done right, you don't notice it. But if you see a whole load of people who all look identical...that just looks wrong. We just don't have that anymore. Now we can just do it...so the enemy AI for instance, they attack and target and do all the things your squad does, so they're not just dummies that run off in a straight line and disappear off the game world. They try and navigate across the world, and hunt down targets."

Marcus was keen to point out that the levels of the game we saw and played had already changed "reasonably significantly" since that build, "Right now the key focus for us is really on polishing bits - the AI has been a strong focus, and a lot of this is not just AI, a lot of it is in the scripting of events. You have to be careful that you don't put characters into events where they're going to cause problems, so you have to spend some time crafting the engagement distances to make sure people aren't too far away. Those are the areas of concentration right now, as they always are at this stage."

So 360 and PS3 versions are looking rather special, but what about current gen versions of CoD3? Marcus says, "Current gen versions are going to lose mainly visual enhancements. The most important thing is that it's a Call of Duty experience on every platform. So you get basically the same environments, with the same events occurring. What you lose is some of the volume, some of the number of characters on screen. There'll be fewer explosions, the sheer amount of stuff going on in the world will be reduced. But it's the same storyline, the same levels. But we squeeze the absolute best we can out of each platform."

Including the Wii? "Yeah, the Wii, we're doing gestures, and also pointing so you can use the controller to point the weapon on screen. In the driving sequences, you hold the controller like you're holding a steering wheel. You flick the nunchuck controller one way to change weapons and the other way to re-load your weapon. Pushing forward does a melee attack, which just makes perfect sense. But we found that if you put too many gestures in there, it becomes confusing for the player, and if you do that, you've defeated the object of doing it.

"The Wii controller is a pretty precise piece of kit, so you get a really nice degree of movement and accuracy from that stuff." This could give Wii owners a significant advantage - as we played CoD3, one of the noticeable features was weapon recoil. As you fired rounds, your muzzle tended to point upwards, and you had to continually use the analog controller to bring it back down onto target. Clearly the Wii controller cannot work the same way - if you had to keep moving it down you'd end up pointing it at the floor - and it could conceivably be easier to target as a result.

While we were in Paris, Activision PR supremo Tim Ponting gave us a quick look at the PS3 version of CoD3. "This is simply to prove it exists", he was quick to stress, explaining to us that even at this stage, Sony are updating their development libraries on a daily basis. For this reason, the game lacked many features that make the 360 version so impressive, such as dynamic lighting. It also suffered badly from slow down. The reason for this was simple, as Tim explained while he battled with a castle full of Nazis and heinously slow frame rates simultaneously, "It's only running on a single processor at present. That's the way development works, especially on a new platform...develop everything on a single processor and make sure it all works 100%, then share it out over the multiple processors."

What we saw of the PS3 version looked pretty - high res and beautifully detailed - but it lacked CoD3's excellent atmospheric effects, and the differential focusing and dynamic lighting - so it looked very flat compared to the 360 version. But what can we expect from the finished PS3 version? Ponting again: "The developers have been pretty impressed with the horsepower of the Cell processor. Although it's a first generation development, it should be on a par with the 360 version, and may even have better atmospheric effects, depending on how soon Sony finalises the development tools. We've had no development code for the controller at all yet, and it's not clear that we'll get that in time to implement it."