Furthermore, it has been said that buildings in Call of Duty 2 will be destructable, and there will be new tanks with which to destroy them.

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BEHIND THE SWASTIKA - 03/03/05

I had a lot of questions for Infinity Ward during my recent visit to see Call of Duty 2 in action at their Southern California offices. But one question in particular had been on my mind for a long time: I asked the guys what consideration they had given to a German campaign -- a single-player set of missions played from the Nazi perspective.

It turns out that this has been a subject of intense debate within Infinity Ward, where the idea has its champions and its opponents. The “ayes” have an interesting variety of reasons for wanting to do it; not only for the change of pace, but also because there’s a human story to tell there.

“There’s just an appeal to playing the best of the best,” says company president Grant Collier. “(The Germans) were probably the best army in the world at the time.”

The prospect of a German Call of Duty campaign has intrigued me since I first played the original game. Not only do I think it would be thrilling to be in the “enemy’s” boots for a change, but I firmly believe there is an enlightening, even moving story to be told. With the passage of sixty years, it’s possible to look back on the great sweep of World War II and find the common human experience of soldiers of every nation, swept up by events far larger than themselves.

The broad outlines sort of write themselves, and I was pleased to hear these thoughts echoed by the Infinity Ward developers, who have obviously given this a lot of thought already.

You would start off the campaign as a young officer in the Wehrmacht, tearing it up in the invasion of the Soviet Union. You’ve been convinced that you’re there to liberate Russians from the yoke of Stalinism. After a few bitter battles and the awful “deep freeze” of that first Russian winter, you’re not so sure anymore. You become aware of the SS squads that are following in your wake, escorting “undesirables” to an uncertain fate. The battle of Stalingrad, in which your division is ordered by Hitler to make a senseless and suicidal stand, finally convinces you that your nation has been hijacked by insanity. So you fall in with like-minded plotters for a culminating mission in which you attempt to assassinate the Fuhrer.

Of course, there are skeptics, and Infinity Ward is far from convinced that such a campaign is feasible. One of the developer’s biggest concerns is the German gaming market. German censors are notorious for bringing the hammer down hard on any in-game representation of Nazi regalia -- games set in World War II rely on a generic “German Army” and cannot make any reference to Hitler or Nazism.

But even this should not be an insurmountable hurdle. After all, that country has allowed the release of some fine German films that treated the war with utmost realism. Das Boot and Stalingrad spring immediately to mind. A similarly serious-minded game should theoretically be able to get past the German censors on the very same grounds of artistic merit and historical significance.

Perhaps the biggest concern is the rhetorical question Collier uses to sum up the current status of the debate: “Are people really going to accept playing as the bad guys?”

It’s a testament to the quality of the Call of Duty series that I have no doubt about Infinity Ward’s ability to pull it off, should they choose to go down that route. After you’ve seen the Call of Duty 2 engine at work, you’ll have no doubts about the level of emotion, intensity, and grittiness achievable in the current generation of shooters. Infinity Ward has taken the “German campaign” off the table for Call of Duty 2, but I can’t think of a development that would advance the FPS genre farther than a sensitive, humanistic rendition of the common German infantryman’s experience in World War II. Here’s hoping this idea’s time comes someday soon.