Interviews// Grant Collier: Call Of Duty 4

SPOnG: Has not doing a WWII game freed you up in certain ways, such as in terms of storyline?

Grant Collier: Yeah. We really needed to create a bad villain, since we don’t have Nazis to kill any more. In previous Call of Duty games, you could start off and know that those guys are bad – we need to kill them for X, Y and Z reasons. We spent a lot of time working on the storyline – we’ve hired Hollywood writers who are really great at creating cliff-hangers.

They’ll have a cliff-hanger right before a commercial break that gets people to stick in their seats right through the commercials to keep watching the show. Then, at the end of the show, they’ll have another cliff-hanger that makes you wait another week, and you’ll actually care enough to watch it a week later. So, we’ve had them help us create those cliff-hangers in the game, except that they don’t come before a commercial break but before the end of a level. That has been exciting.

Also, we’ve really focused on the characters within the game, making characters that people really believe in and that they become kind of emotionally invested in.


SPOnG: It’s a second-generation next-gen game – what did that enable you to do?

Grant Collier: When we were working on Call of Duty 2, we were working on software emulators and hardware emulators, and we only got final hardware two months before the ship. So ,it was like: “Well, make sure it also runs on this hardware, and send it to the factory.”

Back then, we had guys who were just learning to do normal mapping and specular mapping and bump-mapping. So now that they can do that stuff they’ve been working from day one with a great understanding of all those next-gen art techniques.

The programmers know how to save just a ton of memory, so we have the room to push things with the physics, the lighting and the particle systems. And still be able to run at 60fps (frames per second). So, there are a lot of doors that have been opened up, and I’d have to say there are no developers out there who have the level of experience on next-gen consoles that we do. We completed the first next-gen game and we’ve been working on this one for 18 months now.

A lot of the games that came out last Christmas were maybe slated to be launch titles but, because of whatever reason, they came out a year later. This Christmas will see the first real batch of second-generation next-gen titles.