Activision’s behind doors CoDG presentation featured a second playable mission that was not shown on the show floor. The mission was called Federation Day and it takes place in Venezuela. It begins with a small team of special ops (seems weird to call them Ghosts as that’s the term used for Ghost Recon, but I’ll go with it) who are high up on a rooftop downtown in a large city. Fireworks light up the sky, but the Ghosts aren’t here to celebrate. The mission is to break into a nearby skyscraper and either capture or rescue (I can’t recall which they said it was and the full mission with its conclusion was not shown) an important contact.
So, you’re instructed to prep your zip-line and the other Ghosts follow suit. You do so by pressing X on a box which reveals a machine that can shoot out a zip-line. Although you’re not going from rooftop to rooftop — you’re actually zipping across but bouncing off of the skyscraper’s exterior to immediately start repelling down the side.
The constant instructions you’re provided from the omnipotent voice in your ear helps you walk across the exterior, carefully selecting times to shoot unsuspecting enemies inside. The AI kicks in with a few kills of its own. The initial tangos down, you break out a laser cutter and quickly make yourself a circular hole to bust through. The Ghosts then get to a data room and tap into a machine for roughly sixty seconds. Meanwhile, an unsuspecting patrol strolls by and you see an AI Ghost sneak out for a silent kill on the trailing patrolman.
The Ghosts get back out to the building to do a lot more downward repelling — way more line being used here than I ever thought was initially launched by the machine mentioned earlier. I don’t know where all of the extra slack in repel line is coming from, but regardless the Ghosts proceed to work their way down the building, taking out tangos as necessary.
Around this time they faded to black and put up a message that read “In the interest of time…” When the demo resumes, the building is in shambles and floors are literally splitting apart and they’re no longer parallel with the ground. It’s a very hectic scene that lasts a few seconds before the demo ends.
Preceding this behind-closed-doors exclusive mission was the No Man’s Land mission which takes place in present day, ten miles outside of San Diego. This mission focuses on Riley, the dog that was modeled after a real Navy SEAL combat dog. We’re told that Riley has some interesting features. One of these is a little periscope camera that wirelessly relays what he sees to you, and in this mode you can actually control Riley in the first person view. Riley is also tapped into comms as he can receive commands even when he’s not close by — pretty cool, huh?
Anyway, the opening to this mission allows for a bit of story development as the fellow soldier with you describes his shock at the scene. And it’s pretty bad, no doubt — roads are crumbled, buildings are falling apart. You’ll see a broken statue and a church that is in ruins. Soon after you make contact with some tangos and Riley goes nuts. He’s able to efficiently take down individual foes with this ferocious bite. Towards the end of the clip of this mission we saw, Riley is sent into a building by himself. Moments later, in a scripted slo-mo event, Riley and three or four enemies burst through a set of double doors. Riley’s hanging onto a dude’s arm with his teeth. You and the NPC Ghost are encouraged to kill the enemies while in slo-mo.
The third mission we saw a part of was called Into the Deep, and it takes place somewhere in the Caribbean Sea. This is an underwater mission and you and a Ghost NPC are tasked with clearing the way for the next phase of a bigger operation. This is one of those missions where the NPC talks almost constantly, explaining to you what’s going on and what to do. The enemy is using sonar, so you have to swim slow. They also have scuba patrols that you have to duck and hide from. They skipped ahead to later in the mission to a scene where you had to control a torpedo from a first person view and slam it into an enemy ship.
Before all of this was a tech demo that talked about, and demonstrated, some of the new capabilities of this engine. Tessellation, which in their example was used to illustrate their new ability to give surfaces more intricate details was shown first. A rocky surface next to a stream was shown with tessellation off — it was flat and boring. With tessellation enabled, suddenly the shores of this stream had a lot of rigid texture to them with rocks of varying shape and position.
Sub-D tech is similar to anti-aliasing. It’s meant to keep the jaggies out of your view, no matter how much you zoom into a surface. We were shown the game world — in this case the side of a stone mountain — with and without Sub-D. The difference is noticeable. Third, the team talked about how they’re making lighting more realistic. Their example was what happens when you go from viewing something in darkness to light — your pupils adjust and there is that very brief adjustment that goes on. They’re trying to mimic that.
To sum up, as did they, Call of Duty Ghosts is a new game world with new characters, built on a new game engine. While the game wasn’t playable, it does certainly look better from a purely graphical standpoint, and it also looks to have all of the modern military action the series is known for. We’ll see how it fairs later this year.
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