During the creation of aquatic masterpiece, BioShock, Irrational Studios couldn't figure out how long their game was going to be. Creepy little girls? Check. Violent oafs in diving suits? Check. The number of gameplay hours? Um...
Developers find it easy to predict the length of a shooter, as the genre's linear. But BioShock's more open nature was far more troublesome.
"When we started focus testing, there was a huge time variance from one player to another," says Bill Gardner, lead level designer on the game. "Our concerns mostly came from people who were taking too long rather than people ploughing through, so we had to find ways to guide players along without holding their hands too much. This scared the shit out of us at first."
MW 2019 is five years old at this point and on previous gen hardware, but it is still the best looking Call of Duty game to date.
MW was an excellent videogame. They messed up Spec Ops big time, but aside from this it was a huge step in the right direction initially. Most notably, at launch it seemed to come from a very cohesive creative vision that was felt across gameplay, to story to art style/visual direction. It was also very notably written by prominent ex-Naughty Dog guys that quit almost immediately before release.
That COMPLETELY dissolved through post-launch content and the full pivot to a "cross-mode" narrative that completely obliterated the cohesion in overall story direction. Warzone then "became" the new face of Call of Duty and the franchise completely removed itself from anything remotely creatively "good". It is a pure money machine, so I kinda get why they're doing it....but I personally completely lost interest.
I would love to see Infinity Ward move off CoD and get to make their own product with full control. They clearly have some massive talent in their ranks but it's perverted by Activision's corporate interests.
Hey Poor Player's James Davie Takes Us On A Bio-Shocking Deep Dive Into Irrational Games' Nautical Nightmare.
Call Of Duty is back with its yearly instalment, but is Modern Warfare 3 breaking new ground, or just a lazy cash grab? The answer may not surprise you in today's review from JDR.
