Interviews// Grant Collier: Call Of Duty 4

SPOnG: Can you go through some of the stuff that you wanted to put in COD 2 but couldn’t?

Grant Collier: The challenges back then were shipping on time, figuring out how to work with the architecture, making things run at 60fps, working on Live, which, at the time, they were still creating. I guess player-count was one thing – we always wanted more than just eight players.

Now, having Live for the Xbox 360 as a stable platform, that allows us to really improve the multiplayer, and move the player-count up to 12-16. Previously, we had baked-in shadows, and I remember our art director being pissed off about having to bake in the shadows to the textures. He wanted a shadowing system like we have now.


SPOnG: How has it been developing for both 360 and PS3?

Grant Collier: What we like is the ability to really push things graphically – the amount of horsepower that these consoles have blows away current-gen consoles. So, having these really advanced shader systems and shadowing and being able to do them on both platforms is great. You have to do them in different ways, so we have dedicated programming teams working on each console. They understand what the technology is and how we want to do these things – they just have to get into the Sony mindset or the Microsoft mindset to take advantage of them.


SPOnG: Will the 360 version run at 1080p?

Grant Collier: Yes.


SPOnG: Were there lots of discussions with Activision regarding changing Call of Duty to a modern-combat franchise?

Grant Collier: Activision really trusts us, and they know that we won’t let them down, so they give us a free rein in that area. That’s a really nice part of the relationship. Everyone was kind of on board with it early on, and I don’t think there was any doubt that people were going to embrace it. There are gamers out there who are really turned off by World War II. They’ll get to experience Call of Duty for the first time.

With the multiplayer, we want to bring in a whole new crowd. We’ve really simplified everything – made it so that, if you’ve got a group of friends, you can jump into multiplayer game after multiplayer game, instead of sitting there artificially when you have to be the server, and you have to wait until all your friends get in. You can now create a group which can go from game to game.


SPOnG: Did you think of doing a Wii version?

Grant Collier: The reason we picked these platforms is that we can really focus on pushing them, and their advantages are really similar, whereas the Wii’s advantages are really different. We have many people at Infinity Ward who are fans of the Wii, but if we wanted to do a game for it, we would target it specifically and leverage its strengths, rather than just doing a down-port.


SPOnG: Thanks for your time, Grant.