Infinity Ward and Activision have a lot of work ahead of them. Theirlackluster release of Call of Duty 2 has left a bad taste in a lot ofgamers' mouths, and none of them are too happy about it. They have noreason to be happy about it considering what they've had to put upwith, both before and after Call of Duty 2's release. Even in thefledgling days of Infinity Ward, a company formed of people who hadworked for EA Games and created the beloved Medal of Honor: AlliedAssault, their credibility was set upon a needlepoint, and I think theyfell right off.

Back in the day, when the original Call of Duty was beingdeveloped, four members of Infinity Ward gave a chatroom-basedinterview 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 InfinityWard,” made a number of claims towards mod support and a softwaredevelopment kit (SDK). The others along the way promised a game thatreally made you feel like you were part of something bigger; a gamethat made you feel like you were not alone in your struggle; one thatdid not make you feel like Rambo killing swathes of German soldiers,but rather as a member of a team that did the job. They promisedhistorical accuracy.

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

So now, Infinity Ward is a subsidiary of Activision. What doesthis mean? I'll tell you; it means Infinity Ward now gets its fundingstraight from Activision. Infinity Ward no longer has to care about itscommunity. For a while, this doesn't show; the game is released, thefans are raving, IWNation is named the “official forum” of InfinityWard although it is not owned by them. The modding community waits withbated 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 idsoftware's Q3 engine? And sure enough, the modding tools come out, andthe 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 wasa well-designed mapping program which included the exceptional terrainblending capability. They gave us tools to import models into the game.They also provided us some documentation on things like recommendedcompile settings and portalling. But didn't they say something about anSDK? This wasn't even an MDK.

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

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

It was only at this point that we began to recall they hadpromised an SDK, and only at this point did I realize that we shouldhave 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 blatantlylied to.

With this, the road has been paved to Call of Duty 2. Honestlyspeaking, when I heard that Call of Duty 2 was in development, aboutthe first thing I wondered was, “Why?” I saw no need to expand on thefranchise at that time, especially when I saw the screenshots of thenew iteration and could see very little improvement. At the time, I waswilling to chalk it all up to early production and lightingexperimentation.

But as time went on, I continued to see screenshots of the samequality. I began to question the methods being used to create this gameand its graphics engine. I began to wonder if Infinity Ward was soengrossed in trying to create a franchise out of the game they hadcreated that they were looking the other way on a number of otherthings. To see these screenshots having been involved with the originalCall of Duty for so long, I could easily see that they were still usingthe same animations in their new game (for instance, the forward handposition on the PPSH was not gripping anything). Indeed, to see thequality of work done on Call of Duty 2: Big Red One, which also hadscreenshots released at that time, one could easily come to the sameconclusion, as the graphics and quality of mapping were, to be veryblunt, poor – and since it was a console game, they would only getworse 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 familiarsense of claustrophobia. I recognized the feeling from Halo: CombatEvolved, which is a direct console port of the X-Box game, Halo. Onconsole shooters, because of the position console players play from(across the room, not directly in front of a monitor), the viewpoint onyour first-person camera is much more far forward and the field ofvision 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, butI didn't think it really affected gameplay. The grenades were nowthrown by pressing a separate key, no more switching to them as a thirdweapon slot; I've always enjoyed that feature in other games such asHalo and Brothers in Arms as I feel it more accurately reflects the waygrenades are handled in real life. Then, having taken too much damage,I noticed that I was thrown into the prone position with astrangely-familiar flashing red ring around my screen as I “recovered”from being shot; no medic, no first aid kits, just get into cover for afew moments.

For a good solid hour, I was trying to remember where I had seenthis before, and it hit me like a bolt of lightning. I felt like I wasplaying 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, ifthe game is good the setting is irrelevant. That said, we think thatWWII is a great setting for a game.” I suppose, with Vince being theChief Creative Officer, this idea caught on around the office. As longas 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 thevery setting and genre while keeping its gameplay elements in tact andthe game will be just as good.

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

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

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

You then have the distance from this screen; on a PC, you are only2-4 feet from the monitor, which means in order to feel proper itshould have a much broader field of vision, with peripheral, and theicons and text on the screen should not be larger than necessarybecause the player can read them fine at their current distance. Thisin opposition to a TV monitor which players will be playing at fromacross a room; the perception then would be more of a tunnel intoanother world that you're looking into, and such a small field ofvision with no peripheral is perfectly acceptable. However, this is nottaken into account in Call of Duty 2's two separate versions; they eachuse the television format of a claustrophobic tunnel-like perspectiveand large fonts.

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

Now, some of these issues may not seem major, but the thing thatmade them major in the PC market was the inability to disable themwithout 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 similaritiespoints to one very interesting thought: it may well be a direct consoleport to the PC, which would mean, once again, that Infinity Ward hasbeen lying to the community.

But the issues do not simply stop with the inability to changesuch options on the PC. There is also the X-Box 360 version of Call ofDuty 2's multiplayer lobbies. You are not able to create and play onyour own private Call of Duty 2 server. You must instead join one ofInfinity Ward's pre-made servers through their public lobby system. Youmay not invite friends to join these servers. You may not change thesettings on these servers, and you may not remove cheating orinconsiderate players from these servers because you also may not voteon these servers. The friends list, as Infinity Ward and Activision'shelp desk officials have continually referred to as the remedy to thisissue, does nothing to actually solve the issue; rather, it acts onlyto infuriate the player as it shows just how feeble it is to have afeature like this when you cannot invite your friend to join a gamewhich is in-progress, and, once enough players say they are ready toplay, the game begins automatically. When the match is over, allplayers are removed from this server. This is a terrible multiplayersystem that entirely removes the ability to play with friends or tohave 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 flawedconsole. It has been known to crash, and some are known to crashconsistently. It has rapidly gained a reputation for it. In fact, ithas spurred a lawsuit for distributing defective electronics againstMicrosoft. Also, in my opinion, it is a waste of technology that makesvery little advancement in the ability to create games on the console.It has no true reason to exist, save to destroy the ecosystem andbolster both sales and stock. And that's coming from a conservative.

Getting back to the issues, there is also the fact that all of thebugs that once plagued the original release of the first Call of Dutyare quite suddenly present in the new Call of Duty 2, despite InfinityWard's adamant claims that their game runs on a proprietary new enginecreated in-house – certainly not the Q3 engine again, they claim. Allevidence thus far says otherwise; while it is true that they may havesimply 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 thecompetitive play for the original Call of Duty. They also includeprone-skipping (a bug that will randomly make your character skipacross the ground when they go prone at a rapid rate) and bunny-hopping(jumping over and over with no penalty to speed or accuracy whileopponents get a ridiculously-hard target to shoot at), as well as a fewothers 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 PCwithout using the “Force DirectX 7” option, which greatly reduces thequality of the graphics. These would be well-received by me, if theincrease in graphics was truly noticeable. It is not. I have scarcelyfound any excuse to have applied such high expectations to suchlow-quality work. It's like a sixteen-year-old kid selling modern arthe made for $600 because he knows the term “post-modern expressionism.”You can't just create smoothing groups on your models, apply high-restextures, apply ready-made shaders and call it “suitable fornext-generation technology.” Especially when it doesn't look good whenyou do it.

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

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

Now, we get to the worst part of it all. When the original Call ofDuty 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 theiranti-cheat software, Punkbuster, into the game.

Yet, as if they have no recollection of the terrible stink thatmade, they released Call of Duty 2 with no anti-cheat software. Afterless than a week, hacks were ready for both PC and X-Box 360 versionsof the game. One person has been noted to say that over half of thepeople 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 theepitome of the Call of Duty community's lashing out against InfinityWard's terrible decisions. More than 3,000 players and 200 large clanshave banded together to protest the lack of an anti-cheat in Call ofDuty 2. They are preparing a strike on all the online servers,disallowing the use of their servers while renaming them, “We Supportthe CCA!” It sounds like an interesting plan. I think it was done oncebefore for a real-time strategy game; I may well be mistaken.

There are currently a couple of mysteries as well. The first iswhy KamikazeSpoon (Sarah Michael) left her job at Infinity Wardrecently; now that she no longer works for Infinity Ward, the lastdirect 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 allhonesty, 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 bythe CCA strike. I hope the gaming industry as a whole will take note ofjust how far gamers are willing to go now in order to tell thedevelopers that they do not accept that they are being forced to buygames in order to beta test them.

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


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