Coinciding with the action-packed and Troy Baker-infused story trailer for Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare yesterday, GamesBeat released an interview with Sledgehammer Games Co-Founder Michael Condrey, where he revealed that their upcoming game has the scope of four Hollywood movies:
With three years and a new engine and a new generation of hardware and a new brand, you’ll see this is not the same old Call of Duty. We had the people, the resources, and the time. This has the scale and the scope of the equivalent of four Hollywood movies in it. It has hundreds of hours of multiplayer gameplay. It has full co-operative mode. It takes an army of industry vets to create this kind of content.
Taking advantage of the new consoles, fellow Sledgehammer Games Co-Founder Glen Schofield talked about how everything in Advanced Warfare is new, saying, “We really upgraded the characters with a new facial system. We are lighting the game in a new way. All of it is new. It’s next-generation, and it’s 40 years in the future. There is really nothing you can borrow. This game had to be done from scratch. This is really a brand new franchise within Call of Duty. It’s a new intellectual property.”
Condrey then said, “We’re really grateful because we had a chance to go after the next-generation experience and really innovate. It was time to give you a new experience.”
Schofield added, “We want to make sure that people realize it’s not a turn of the crank. The amount of research we put into this game is insane – the books, the articles, the scientists we talk to, the trips we’ve taken, the people we’ve brought in.”
After Condrey said how they were “inspired by films like Black Hawk Down and games like what Naughty Dog [did] with The Last of Us,” Schofield talked a bit about the story, which features just one main character:
The story was something we focused on a lot of time on. It was written by Sledgehammer Games.It’s not just a military story. It’s about friendship and working together with the guy in the fox hole. It’s personal stuff. Emotional times. It’s about life, family, pain, and loss. We made sure we didn’t have a nation-state as the enemy. Is it going to be China? Is it going to be North Korea? Who’s going to be fighting us? Ripped from the headlines, we saw the growth of the private military corporations in Iraq and Afghanistan. You play one guy through the game, Private Mitchell. He becomes a hardened veteran. He’s even narrating.
Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare will be released on November 4 for the PlayStation 4, PlayStation 3, Xbox One, Xbox 360, and PC. You can check out the various collector’s editions by heading over here.
