The Legacy of Infinity Ward and the Call of Duty franchise,
as told by a Disillusioned Community Insider

Infinity Ward and Activision have a lot of work ahead of them. Their lackluster release of Call of Duty 2 has left a bad taste in a lot of gamers' mouths, and none of them are too happy about it. They have no reason to be happy about it considering what they've had to put up with, both before and after Call of Duty 2's release. Even in the fledgling days of Infinity Ward, a company formed of people who had worked for EA Games and created the beloved Medal of Honor: Allied Assault, their credibility was set upon a needlepoint, and I think they fell right off.

Back in the day, when the original Call of Duty was being developed, four members of Infinity Ward gave a chatroom-based interview moderated and later posted as a chat log by Gamespy; this interview can be found at Gamespy Arcade. In this interview, “Jason West, Chief Technical Officer for Infinity Ward,” made a number of claims towards mod support and a software development kit (SDK). The others along the way promised a game that really made you feel like you were part of something bigger; a game that made you feel like you were not alone in your struggle; one that did not make you feel like Rambo killing swathes of German soldiers, but rather as a member of a team that did the job. They promised historical accuracy.

When the game was about to be released, Infinity Ward was acquired by Activision. This is where I began to feel a little leery. Activision is basically known, for good reason, in the gaming community as “that company that did Unreal – but gee, what else did they do?” With a track record that stretches back to the days of Atari, Activision has had a very long history of second-string games that have never really made a buzz. As mentioned, the only game series that Activision has created that has truly thrived is Unreal. This is a company that should have floundered years ago.

So now, Infinity Ward is a subsidiary of Activision. What does this mean? I'll tell you; it means Infinity Ward now gets its funding straight from Activision. Infinity Ward no longer has to care about its community. For a while, this doesn't show; the game is released, the fans are raving, IWNation is named the “official forum” of Infinity Ward although it is not owned by them. The modding community waits with bated breath for their promised SDK.

At this time, no one really had quite put together the puzzle, myself included. How could an SDK be released for a game made on id software's Q3 engine? And sure enough, the modding tools come out, and the community gives it an inquisitive, puppy-like tilt of the head. “What is this, pray tell?”

All kidding aside, the tools were nice. Call of Duty's Radiant was a well-designed mapping program which included the exceptional terrain blending capability. They gave us tools to import models into the game. They also provided us some documentation on things like recommended compile settings and portalling. But didn't they say something about an SDK? This wasn't even an MDK.

For a while, no complaints were arising. Infinity Ward seemed to be keeping their promise, supporting the community with patches that fixed major bugs and exploits such as bunny hopping; some of the community disliked the “fix” for bunny hopping, although I found it to be just what was necessary.

Then, when the major modding started, the modding community began seeing troubles arise. They found that the majority of what they needed to create good mods was hard-coded into the DLL files, thus making it illegal to gain access to them. A number of mods either snapped in and out of existence, or switched over to Return to Castle Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory and then snapped in and out of existence. Though a number of requisites went in to Activision, Infinity Ward, and their employees, no direct support for the serious Call of Duty mods (Heat of Battle, Breaking 50, SWAT, Revolt – forgive me if I've left some out) was provided, and all suffered greatly for it. Sarah Michael, known as KamikazeSpoon, an employee of Infinity Ward, kept us informed of a number of things and was the closest we had to a direct contact with Infinity Ward, but as far as I know she had no say in helping with mods. As my friend, Coleman, head of the Breaking 50 mod, said, “Infinity Ward had the modding community at its feet, and they chose to do nothing.”

It was only at this point that we began to recall they had promised an SDK, and only at this point did I realize that we should have known better than to expect one for a game made on the Q3 engine, and that was the moment when we all realized that we had been blatantly lied to.



With this, the road has been paved to Call of Duty 2. Honestly speaking, when I heard that Call of Duty 2 was in development, about the first thing I wondered was, “Why?” I saw no need to expand on the franchise at that time, especially when I saw the screenshots of the new iteration and could see very little improvement. At the time, I was willing to chalk it all up to early production and lighting experimentation.

But as time went on, I continued to see screenshots of the same quality. I began to question the methods being used to create this game and its graphics engine. I began to wonder if Infinity Ward was so engrossed in trying to create a franchise out of the game they had created that they were looking the other way on a number of other things. To see these screenshots having been involved with the original Call of Duty for so long, I could easily see that they were still using the same animations in their new game (for instance, the forward hand position on the PPSH was not gripping anything). Indeed, to see the quality of work done on Call of Duty 2: Big Red One, which also had screenshots released at that time, one could easily come to the same conclusion, as the graphics and quality of mapping were, to be very blunt, poor – and since it was a console game, they would only get worse considering consoles' low resolutions.

Then the demo came out. My initial fears were confirmed, and many new ones sprung up.

The first thing I felt in the game was a distinct and familiar sense of claustrophobia. I recognized the feeling from Halo: Combat Evolved, which is a direct console port of the X-Box game, Halo. On console shooters, because of the position console players play from (across the room, not directly in front of a monitor), the viewpoint on your first-person camera is much more far forward and the field of vision is much narrower; this is exactly how Call of Duty 2 feels. “There's something fishy going on here,” I thought.

I noticed the lack of the health bar; I thought it was silly, but I didn't think it really affected gameplay. The grenades were now thrown by pressing a separate key, no more switching to them as a third weapon slot; I've always enjoyed that feature in other games such as Halo and Brothers in Arms as I feel it more accurately reflects the way grenades are handled in real life. Then, having taken too much damage, I noticed that I was thrown into the prone position with a strangely-familiar flashing red ring around my screen as I “recovered” from being shot; no medic, no first aid kits, just get into cover for a few moments.

For a good solid hour, I was trying to remember where I had seen this before, and it hit me like a bolt of lightning. I felt like I was playing a hacked-up version of Halo 2 placed in a World War II setting. Remember from the previous article, Vince Zampella's quote, “To me, if the game is good the setting is irrelevant. That said, we think that WWII is a great setting for a game.” I suppose, with Vince being the Chief Creative Officer, this idea caught on around the office. As long as it's a good game, the setting is irrelevant – which translates to, if it's a good game then you can change its content right down to the very setting and genre while keeping its gameplay elements in tact and the game will be just as good.

My personal views on the game were now shot, and I went out trying to convince others that Infinity Ward would not change their colors, and that they had sullied the good name of Call of Duty with their new game. I was, unfortunately, not able to convince anyone.



To be fair, I have decided to keep fact and opinion separate from here onward. We'll start the facts, starting with the fact that in order to develop a video game for two systems at once, you must have divided resources within your development company to do this. Since both systems have aspects that differ greatly from one another, this means specific considerations must be undertaken; in my opinion, it shows that they were not.

The control scheme and other features such as player response time and proximity to the display are vastly different on the PC than they are on the X-Box 360. On the PC, you firstly have a monitor whose resolution vastly outweighs that of a television screen, which is the option that the vast majority of X-Box 360 owners go for.

You then have the distance from this screen; on a PC, you are only 2-4 feet from the monitor, which means in order to feel proper it should have a much broader field of vision, with peripheral, and the icons and text on the screen should not be larger than necessary because the player can read them fine at their current distance. This in opposition to a TV monitor which players will be playing at from across a room; the perception then would be more of a tunnel into another world that you're looking into, and such a small field of vision with no peripheral is perfectly acceptable. However, this is not taken into account in Call of Duty 2's two separate versions; they each use the television format of a claustrophobic tunnel-like perspective and large fonts.

Usually, a distance from the screen also means a distance from sound sources. On a computer monitor while near the speakers or wearing headphones, you can catch details such as which side an opponent is coming from, or you can see when a grenade is thrown, follow it to where it lands, and avoid it. On a TV across the room with the typical TV speakers running rather than a stereo system, such details are easily missed. Thus, Infinity Ward added into the game, on both PC and X-Box 360 versions, icons over enemy's heads, crosshairs that turn red when on an enemy, grenade marker icons, and icons to the compass that shows the positions of nearby enemies (which is also like Halo).

Now, some of these issues may not seem major, but the thing that made them major in the PC market was the inability to disable them without a mod. And with a mod, a server is less likely to be played – it's tried and true. However, all of these very direct similarities points to one very interesting thought: it may well be a direct console port to the PC, which would mean, once again, that Infinity Ward has been lying to the community.

But the issues do not simply stop with the inability to change such options on the PC. There is also the X-Box 360 version of Call of Duty 2's multiplayer lobbies. You are not able to create and play on your own private Call of Duty 2 server. You must instead join one of Infinity Ward's pre-made servers through their public lobby system. You may not invite friends to join these servers. You may not change the settings on these servers, and you may not remove cheating or inconsiderate players from these servers because you also may not vote on these servers. The friends list, as Infinity Ward and Activision's help desk officials have continually referred to as the remedy to this issue, does nothing to actually solve the issue; rather, it acts only to infuriate the player as it shows just how feeble it is to have a feature like this when you cannot invite your friend to join a game which is in-progress, and, once enough players say they are ready to play, the game begins automatically. When the match is over, all players are removed from this server. This is a terrible multiplayer system that entirely removes the ability to play with friends or to have any kind of competitive or community play on the X-Box 360 version.

Let us also not forget the fact that the X-Box 360 is a flawed console. It has been known to crash, and some are known to crash consistently. It has rapidly gained a reputation for it. In fact, it has spurred a lawsuit for distributing defective electronics against Microsoft. Also, in my opinion, it is a waste of technology that makes very little advancement in the ability to create games on the console. It has no true reason to exist, save to destroy the ecosystem and bolster both sales and stock. And that's coming from a conservative.

Getting back to the issues, there is also the fact that all of the bugs that once plagued the original release of the first Call of Duty are quite suddenly present in the new Call of Duty 2, despite Infinity Ward's adamant claims that their game runs on a proprietary new engine created in-house – certainly not the Q3 engine again, they claim. All evidence thus far says otherwise; while it is true that they may have simply stuck to the same method of coding that leads to such evidence, that does not explain these exploits.

These exploits and bugs include the infamous “left lean” bug that, according to some (as I'm not sure that I buy it), ruined the competitive play for the original Call of Duty. They also include prone-skipping (a bug that will randomly make your character skip across the ground when they go prone at a rapid rate) and bunny-hopping (jumping over and over with no penalty to speed or accuracy while opponents get a ridiculously-hard target to shoot at), as well as a few others which I'm afraid I'm slightly too lazy at the moment to find.

There is also the system requirements to run this game on the PC without using the “Force DirectX 7” option, which greatly reduces the quality of the graphics. These would be well-received by me, if the increase in graphics was truly noticeable. It is not. I have scarcely found any excuse to have applied such high expectations to such low-quality work. It's like a sixteen-year-old kid selling modern art he made for $600 because he knows the term “post-modern expressionism.” You can't just create smoothing groups on your models, apply high-res textures, apply ready-made shaders and call it “suitable for next-generation technology.” Especially when it doesn't look good when you do it.



As if all of this wasn't enough, there is also the modding community. They have found Call of Duty 2 to be a complete waste of their time. Mappers who wish to have something to do wait anxiously for working mapping tools, but aside from that the modding front is quiet and continues to grow quieter. There are the proprietary IWI image files that no one can open – or, that is until recently someone created a program that can convert them – in order to create new graphics for the game. The scripts are even less accessible than the original Call of Duty, making even fewer modding avenues open for exploration.

Most of all, there's the lack of an interest in the modding community due to the fact that Infinity Ward failed to create such an interest with their lack of support on their original game. Modding interest goes by a franchise's notoriety in that field. By alienating the modding community, Infinity Ward has no chance of gaining it back with the Call of Duty franchise. Even if they do create an SDK, no one will play Call of Duty 2 mods simply for lack of interest in the gamers that would otherwise play these mods because they did not buy the game for that reason.

Now, we get to the worst part of it all. When the original Call of Duty was released, within a week there was a plethora of hacks for it, most converted directly over from other games running on the Q3 engine. Because of this, Infinity Ward teamed up with EvenBalance to add their anti-cheat software, Punkbuster, into the game.

Yet, as if they have no recollection of the terrible stink that made, they released Call of Duty 2 with no anti-cheat software. After less than a week, hacks were ready for both PC and X-Box 360 versions of the game. One person has been noted to say that over half of the people that have come onto their 32-player server have been using hacks.

This is where the CCA steps in. The CCA (its name standing for “Call of Duty Community Action”) is the epitome of the Call of Duty community's lashing out against Infinity Ward's terrible decisions. More than 3,000 players and 200 large clans have banded together to protest the lack of an anti-cheat in Call of Duty 2. They are preparing a strike on all the online servers, disallowing the use of their servers while renaming them, “We Support the CCA!” It sounds like an interesting plan. I think it was done once before for a real-time strategy game; I may well be mistaken.

There are currently a couple of mysteries as well. The first is why KamikazeSpoon (Sarah Michael) left her job at Infinity Ward recently; now that she no longer works for Infinity Ward, the last direct link between the community and the company has been severed. There is also the circumstances by which the Visioneers testing group, which was working for Activision, was fired.

How all this will play out will be interesting to see. In all honesty, I hope it humbles Activision to see this highly-public outcry. I hope that, if they are in fact the bullied party in all of this, Infinity Ward's resolve to make a better product will be reassured by the CCA strike. I hope the gaming industry as a whole will take note of just how far gamers are willing to go now in order to tell the developers that they do not accept that they are being forced to buy games in order to beta test them.

Be ye not confused. An unfinished product is a beta, whether it is on the market or not. You do not use a patch to complete a product. It is a tool to solve unforeseeable problems, not erase the mistakes of stubborn design and short-sighted shortcuts.


Signed,
Adam Wright, “Reish Vedaur”
16 December 2005

A sad story. Do you think it is repairable?

like im gonna read all that

can som1 explain wot thats about plz, in easy'a words :p lol

i agree with you almost entirely reishvedaur, and hope that IW doesnt fall prey to Activisions lackluster history, for this was apparant even before they purchased IW

@Ricsta - knowledge is power, and the only way to glean knowledge is by doing it yourself

This should have been posted weeks ago. I can fully understand why this strike is happening now.

When I was reading the various posts regarding this strike initially I wasn't sure exactly what everyone was harping on about. But when you have it explained like this - you fully understand.

Interesting thing is, without any anticheat software - People get accused of cheating even when they're not. I've never cheated in a game in my life and yet found myself being accused of cheating on a server that I visited for the first time one day! Its just coincidence I played very well - In doing so was "labeled a cheater". Frustrating.

The only thing that I have regularly encountered that I haven't seen mentioned anyware is occasionally, COD2 crashes when loading the next map or section with a DX9 error. Unless you restart the computer it will keep doing it.

Hopefully IW and Activision will sort things out and appease the COD community.

Well said reishvedaur! In my opinion Call of Duty 1 with tweaked graphics, enhanced realism, and a redo of all models, skins & sounds would be much better than CoD2 and whats more is that its all possible in a mod... It seems to me that all IW did to make CoD2 is removed the realism from CoD, ruined CoDs original maps, took everything out of CoD that was good, and then just slapped a 2 on the end... Also, I still play the CoD1 SP today because its so good (not realistic but then again neither is CoD2 is it) and yet I never want to touch CoD2 SP (or MP for that matter) again...

Long winded read but not anything new as most of what is in there can be found at the CCA sight, you know IWNation forums.

I take you to the mat on this quote:


I keep seeing the word PROMISED by you mappers/modders, yet I cannot for the life of me find any reference to PROMISED anywhere online.

From the chatlog:



Do you see PROMISED? I see plan to but you know plans sometimes fall through for whatever reason.

And then more of mat taking:



Be ye confused? Name ONE multiplayer game that has ever been released that did not need some sort of patch to fix problems. Then name one game that after unforseeable problems were patched, the product was complete.

The only thing I agree with when it comes to the CCA is the lack of AC but as we all know, even PB is not perfect, scriptkiddies find their way around PB daily.

As I said, ol-sniper, patches ARE for unforeseeable problems, NOT stubborn design flaws that they pretty much knew (yet were too proud to admit) would not be a good idea in the end. As for Punkbuster, it's kind of like locking doors. Anyone can unlock a door with enough effort, but if it's not locked, they can just go right on in.

The semantics are the only reason they ever got around not getting a full SDK to the community; but you know, when you mention something as big as an SDK, especially before release, and then don't come up with it, that doesn't ring right in the ears of gamers, and the reason for that is because they feel jipped that the one thing many of them were counting on was never there. I just sorta feel bad that I didn't catch the fact that id software would have never allowed an SDK of a Q3 game from the get-go; still, that doesn't excuse them from having said it to generate sales and buzz.

edited on Dec. 18, 2005 08:38 am by reishvedaur

To whomever posted this as news: thank you, first of all, but also there's a LOT of spots on the news article where there is no space between two words, and the original is not like that. What's up?

answer me this, do you know of any games that were released and upon release there was a patch announced? I know of a couple, so I guess you could say they knew but still released, eh?