Call of Duty: World at War Preview

It's the fifth Call of Duty and the fourth to be set during World War II. Instead of CoD 4's Infinity Ward being at the helm, Activison has handed over development responsibilities to one of its in-house studs, Treyarch. The Californian team is no stranger to the CoD franchise though, having previously developed CoD 3 and the Big Red One titles, but with the series returning to the tired WWII FPS genre once again, the developer will have its work cut out to rival the innovative and much loved Modern Warfare of CoD 4.

In order to do this, Treyarch has shifted the traditional WWII shooter setting of Europe and castle dwelling Nazis, to the war in Russia and the Pacific (complete with the Banzai prone Imperial Japanese Army). However, this isn't really original for the genre. The Russian assault from Stalingrad to Berlin featured prominently in the original CoD, while EA's Medal of Honour series has previously visited the American war against Japan with Rising Sun (albeit shockingly badly). We put these points to Treyarch's Executive Producer, Daniel Suarez, and Community Manager, Josh Olin, asking how World at War's story would set itself apart from these two previous games:

Daniel Suarez: I think it's the realism you'll see. With the game we have now, it's the first time we've really displayed a war game the way it almost feels like. I think previously age ratings have tied our hands a little bit and I think the graphical power of the CoD 4 engine allows for highly detailed models and effects. We are having brutal deaths - the idea of bodies getting shot; limbs getting shot...

Josh Olin: The hold no quarter, give no quarter mentality of the Japanese.

D.S.: Sure, so it's a much more visceral game than we've done in the past. I think that's where the big difference will come in. Rising Sun was last-gen... From a graphical standpoint in World at War, the sheer amount of chaos that's ongoing within the battlefield is intense. You saw there, with that tank battle, one of many types of levels where there's things going on and it's chaotic. You'll be seeing guys getting shot, blood flying everywhere, and all different things in terms of the visual nature of, 'Holy shit! That guy just got his arm blown off.' That will be there in this game.

Firing Squad

So, to summarise, there will be more action and violence. Our preview at the Leipzig Game Convention certainly displayed this, with Treyarch's use of fire in the game being a particularly good example of the added grittiness. Everything from Molotov cocktails, flamethrowers, and fire tanks will be used in the game to unleash the fiery fury, and the resulting carnage on enemy soldiers is, well, mesmerising is one word to describe it. We saw a dozen or so Japanese soldiers set alight during the preview, all of which ran around in a ball of flames with their arms flailing before crumbling into a char-grilled heap on the floor. Unfortunately, another word to describe the sensation of seeing this would be crass.

One of the reasons Infinity Ward's CoD games have been so well received is the respect they pay to the grim reality that is war. The developer's games have never glorified warfare and are particularly good at painting the enemy, not as deranged lunatics, but as plain soldiers caught up in the politics of conflict like pawns on a chessboard. This hasn't only been evident in the gameplay, but also in subtle touches like sobering quotes and facts about war in the loading screens. Infinity Ward's advice on war would certainly be of the 'stay in school, kids' variety, while its games are merely a depiction of its harrowing nature.

This is the key element that Treyarch failed to realise in CoD 3 and it looks very much like they'll miss the target with CoD 5 as well. The "Hold no quarter, give no quarter mentality of the Japanese" (as Josh Olin puts it above) was depicted a touch insensitively in the preview we saw, making the enemy appear a bit like the comical Nazis of a Medal of Honour game as a result. Rather than focusing on the elements of honour and servitude that penetrated the Imperial Japanese Army, Treyarch seems to have painted an image of Japanese soldiers as kamikaze happy madmen instead (not quite as bad as the katana wielding generals of Rising Sun, but getting there).

It will certainly have been difficult for Treyarch to draw the line between a gritty representation of war and verging on the disrespectful. To be fair to the developer, there were times during our preview when they got the ingredients just right. The level we saw, 'Hard Landing', takes place on the Japanese occupied island of Peleliu and starts off with your squad of US soldiers stalking a jungle environment. The action kicks in with an ambush of well camouflaged Japanese soldiers, who appeared from the leaf litter like an octopus out of a coral reef. It was a picture perfect FPS set-piece and we're sure that there will be more of them in CoD 5, but it's still a long way from an Infinity Ward production.

Fipping Brilliant

From here the level spilled out onto an open landscape with dusty, scorched ground. What was once jungle had now been razed to the ground (a nice effect) and it was here that Treyarch could show off its intense and chaotic battlefields. The Japanese soldiers were entrenched in some derelict buildings and tanks came thick and fast from all directions, with shelling and gunfire peppering the ground all around us.

This is one element of Infinity Ward's games that Treyarch interprets so well. In both CoD 3 and what we've seen of World at War, there's a constant need for cover when you're performing assaults on enemy positions. Unlike with lesser shooters, constantly strafing while picking out the bad guys simply won't do. Even when you're in cover, you still feel like you're under a barrage of gunfire as bullets periodically "fipp" past your earlobe. It's one of the trademarks of the early CoD games and it's encouraging to see that Treyarch seems to have done as good a job of it in World at War as it did in its previous replications of Infinity Ward's formula.

By the sounds of things however, Treyarch won't be replicating Infinity Ward's formula in the multiplayer game and will instead offer something much closer to its setup for CoD 3. The reason we say this is because Treyarch has confirmed that there will be driveable vehicles in the adversarial multiplayer (including the fire tank). This rings a lot of alarm bells in our heads, especially when we remember the backlash from hardcore CoD fans after cars, bikes, and tanks were included in CoD 3. Core fans argued that it wasn't the pure shooter experience that they'd become used to with CoD 2, and far be it for us to disagree. That said, Treyarch will bring along an XP system to the multiplayer fun (which is very CoD 4) and this time the XP will also grace the new co-op campaign (available for up to 4 players, two of which can play locally via split-screen).

Although World at War is using the same engine as CoD 4, the graphics don't quite have the stylistic and technical edge of last year's best FPS game (according to TVG records). Beyond the lack of nuclear explosions and awesome aerial assaults from an AC-130 Gunship with a heat sensitive camera, the basic environments of CoD 5 just aren't as crisp and refined as Modern Warfare's. The jungle at the beginning of our preview, for example, exhibited trees and bushes that were more detailed than most FPS games, but lacked the stunning textures of a top class effort. It'll certainly be interesting to see how the game's propagating fire tech taps into the gameplay, allowing you to flush enemies out of foxholes etc., although the flames we saw lacked any real brilliance even though they were more than merely presentable.

Kiefer Sutherland will be lending his voice to one of your main AI squad mates in the Pacific campaign, which is more exciting than most game voice-overs. His B-list celebrity status is at least one class up from the usual fodder. However, Treyarch's choice to opt for an industrial punk rock soundtrack rather than the usual classical score more than confuses us. Imagine replacing Samuel Barber's Adagio for Strings with The Prodigy's Firestarter in Platoon - uncool.