Official COD 5 News Feed- New News Posted 06/15/08

[Trunks]

Hope this is the right place to post this.

Yesterday:

COD5 invading 'new theater,' next 007 COD4-powered
Publisher confirms follow-up to Infinity Ward's modern-warfare shooter will have new setting on Xbox 360, PS3, PS2, Wii, and DS; COD4 engine to power next James Bond game, due this fall.
By Tom Magrino, Tor Thorsen, GameSpot
Posted May 8, 2008 8:32 pm ET

Earlier today, Activision made known its dominance in the gaming industry, triumphantly proclaiming it had secured the top publisher slot in the US in terms of console and handheld software dollars. One of the crucial titles driving Activision's $2.9 billion windfall of annual revenue during its 2008 fiscal year was Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, the first contemporary installment in Infinity Ward's long-running first-person shooter series.

It goes without saying that Activision plans a new installment in the Call of Duty franchise during its 2009 fiscal year, which ends March 31, 2009. The publisher has released a new installment in the series every fourth quarter since the series launched in 2003. In today's earnings follow-up with analysts and investors, the publisher dished more details on the fifth Call of Duty game, first revealed in December.

"We'll launch on all four platforms we've participated on in fiscal [year] 2008," Activision Publishing CEO Mike Griffith referring to Call of Duty 4, which sold over 7 million units worldwide on the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, PC, and Nintendo DS in 2007. Griffiths then reconfirmed that "we'll [also] launch on the PS2 and the Wii," marking the series' return to the PS2 and Wii after a two-year hiatus.

In addition to announcing new platforms, Activision also revealed that Call of Duty 5 would again shift the setting of the series. "We'll bring the intensity of the recent Call of Duty: Modern Warfare title to a new military theater to engage our significantly larger user base which nearly doubled last year as new users came into the franchise," said Griffiths. (Emphasis added.) Recent unconfirmed rumors had the series returning to World War II, the conflict in which all games prior to COD4 were set in. The publisher did not say if series creator Infinity Ward or Treyarch (Call of Duty 3, Spider-Man 3) was developing the project.

Speaking of Call of Duty 4, Activision also revealed today that the shooter's powerful game engine will power the new James Bond game. The yet untitled project, which is being developed by Treyarch, is set for release this fall around the same time as the next 007 film, The Quantum of Solace. Its use of the COD4 engine almost assures the game is in development for the PlayStation 3 and 360, and leaves the possibility of a PC version open.



COD5 invading 'new theater,' next 007 COD4-powered
Publisher confirms follow-up to Infinity Ward's modern-warfare shooter will have new setting on Xbox 360, PS3, PS2, Wii, and DS; COD4 engine to power next James Bond game, due this fall.


Possibilities? I'm thinking

Vietnam
Somalia Razz
Burma
Korea
Pacific Assault

It also may not be as bad as we think. It seems Infinity Ward is helping out on it. Just keep your fingers crossed.

[LiNuX]

cod powering 007 lol, interesting

good post - and since doors are open for PC, that's probably my best bet to get the game

[rukisuto]

Be sure not to double post, please :]

Hopefully COD 5 is still alright if IW is helping out like you say.l
Is there a reason Infinity Ward just does every other?

[Trunks]

Sorry, I just did it that way it looked cleaner.

To answer your question it seems that activison, Call of duty's publisher wanted a new call of duty game out every year. This meant that Infinity Ward didn't have enough time to make the games they wanted to. So a compromise was made that Infinity Ward would get 2 years to make another title and treyarch would handle the ones in between.

[jakncoke]

Be sure not to double post, please :]

Hopefully COD 5 is still alright if IW is helping out like you say.l
Is there a reason Infinity Ward just does every other?

I believe I read an article that said after Treyarch does 5.. IW will be doing COD from one. Also COD5 is going to be fail because it's back to WW2.

[Trunks]

CoD5 trailer FTW

Gametrailers.com - Call of Duty: World At War - Full Length Debut Trailer HD (http://www.gametrailers.com/player/35412.html)

[EpsilonX]

they should make a WW1 shooter. haha.

[Trunks]

Call of Duty®: World at War™ completely changes the rules of engagement by redefining WWII gaming and thrusting players into the final tension-filled, unforgiving battles against a new ferocious enemy in the most dangerous and suspenseful action ever seen in WWII.

Powered by Call of Duty® 4: Modern Warfare™ technology, Call of Duty: World at War brings an uncensored edge to combat, as soldiers face the most harrowing and climatic European and Pacific battles in which an enemy, who knows no surrender and no retreat, will fight to the last breath, unleashing an arsenal of lethal surprising tactics. Peril and danger lurk throughout the battlefield as players combat the unknown risk of the new chaos of battle.

From the remains of Russia and the ruins of Berlin, to the beach and jungles of the deadly Pacific Theater, the volatile action takes on added depth as players employ new features that previously were only-available in multiplayer, including perks, rankings and online stats in up-to full four-player cooperative gameplay. New infantry and vehicle-based weapons, like the potent flamethrower, bring the battlefield ablaze.

Don't worry guys... It will still suck, it just sounds like it will be good. Good writers like to trick people like that.



Previews: Call of Duty: World at War
A first look at fighting in the Pacific as the series returns to WWII.

By Garnett Lee 06/23/2008
Target: Call of Duty: World at War

Background: After several tours on World War II battlefields, the Call of Duty series returned in full force last year with Modern Warfare. However, developer Treyarch is taking the fifth outing back to the well-trodden theaters of WWII. The developer's first crack at the series, Call of Duty 3, wasn't a failure by any means. But COD3 fell short of the standard set by the series' previous games and left many fans thinking that Call of Duty might best be left to Infinity Ward, the developer behind the first two COD titles and Modern Warfare. Overcoming that notion will be Treyarch's biggest burden.

For World at War, Treyarch starts out armed with the same engine Infinity Ward used for COD4, with the benefit of having two years to develop exclusively for current console hardware. (Yes, there's a Wii version, but it gets its own development team.) As for the subject material, the developer approaches it with a desire to tell the story of the end of the war -- in both theaters. In Europe you play as part of the Russian forces as they sweep into Germany. More intriguingly, the game also puts you in the Pacific as part of the 1st Marine Division at the Battle of Peleliu and then later at the invasion of Okinawa. These are considered as two of the most difficult operations American forces undertook in the entire war -- on either front -- and there were grievous casualties on both sides.

SCREENS: Click the image above to check out all Call of Duty: World at War screens. ( I am to lazy to add the image, so to bad everyone you can't see them. )

What We Saw: Treyarch studio head Mark Lamia introduced the game with some history of the war in the Pacific. In particular, he pointed out that the Imperial Japanese presented the United States military with a different sort of foe than the Germans: The Japanese fought according to the fundamentals of what we now think of as guerrilla tactics, and their Bushido code (meaning "Way of the Warrior") drove soldiers to fight to the death. When the game demonstration started, the heightened brutality was immediately evident. Starting as a captured soldier in a Japanese prisoner of war camp, we helplessly watched as a fellow soldier was tortured -- the Japanese burned his face with a lit cigarette before they mercilessly slit his throat.

The good guys showed up just in time to save the day, and that's when the action started. As the rescue party moved through a beachside camp full of thatch-roofed huts, the COD4 engine looked better than ever. The soldiers escaped the camp and followed a jungle path to another spot along the beach, where the encounter ended with a Japanese ambush. The next section showed off co-op campaign play, with two soldiers working together as part of a beach assault. This part of the demonstration also highlighted the game's emphasis on fire. Heavy flamethrower use was part of the Marines' strategy for dealing with tenacious Japanese positions, and World at War goes to some length to both make the game's fire look good and make it spread through undergrowth realistically.

Good To Go: Treyarch really capitalizes on the strong tech of the COD4 engine. Both the twilight raid on the POW camp and the daylight beach assault demonstrate how well the engine manages to re-create natural lighting effects and highly detailed environments. Starting with a set engine allowed the team to spend much of its tech-development time on creating better tools. As a result, they now have a system that allows them to quickly work on level designs as they play them. When something doesn't play as well as they like or lacks the right pacing, they simply rip it apart and start tweaking until it does.

SCREENS: Click the image above to check out all Call of Duty: World at War screens.

Good To Go: COD4 earned a strong reputation for its online play and World at War appears poised to follow right along. While a few elements that carry over from COD4 seem a bit out of place -- such as reconnaissance flyovers -- the core mechanic, with its promotion system and rewards, still makes for a good foundation. And while the developer wasn't ready to give any details, one area of focus has been on improving squad play so that you can play together with your friends in a meaningful way. Treyarch has also developed a new "spawn influencer system" to help overcome bad spawn-point issues. The system takes a number of factors into consideration before bringing you back to the battle in what it considers the best place to rejoin your team. This helps you get back to the action without hassle. The other big change from Modern Warfare is the inclusion of vehicles. They get their own levels and modes, so you can count on having big, heavy, rumbling battles.

Warning Sign: COD3 was plagued by levels that were too linear, and the escape from the POW camp in World at War appears to similarly herd you along the way. While the demonstration followed the rescuers through the camp, it was hard to tell whether there were any opportunities to deviate from the course the A.I. was taking. We also watched a scene play out where a GI and Japanese soldier, locked in a grapple, burst out of a doorway right in front of us. By shooting the Japanese soldier, you saved the GI -- it's eerily similar to a scene that occurred early in COD4. It made us pause and wonder whether World at War would wind up feeling like a series of Modern Warfare scenes recast in 1944.

Lukewarm Afterglow: The action we saw in the Pacific setting lived up to its billing of being more intense and brutal than what we've seen before in COD games. Watching enemy soldiers engulfed in flames and then seeing their charred remains made a powerful impact. But at the same time, you quickly got a sense that there was no way around it as the enemy unexpectedly rose up out of the grass in an ambush or fired on your squad from heavily entrenched positions. It's easy to see how you could find yourself scorching everything around you with each step just to be sure. As Lamia pointed out at the beginning of the presentation, the Pacific theater presents a fertile field in which to stage the game...which begs the question: Why include Europe? As noble as telling the story of the end of the war may be, revisiting Europe plays right into the sense of "been there, done that" and eats up time that could have been spent exploring new battles in places we haven't been before. This demo did take a much-needed first step in demonstrating that Treyarch can match Modern Warfare's technical presentation; now we need to see if they can nail the rest.


All i have to say is LAWL @ wii



Call of Duty: World at War First Look
We encounter a very different style of combat in the jungles of the Pacific with Treyarch's return to World War II.
By Shaun McInnis, GameSpot
Posted Jun 23, 2008 2:57 pm ET

Last year's Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare was more that just a great game. It took a series that made a name for itself under the rich tapestry of World War II and pushed it some 60 years into the future. The end result was a game that used the latest advances in weaponry, in a setting influenced by some of today's most tense conflicts, to produce an experience both stirring and refreshing. Since then, the big question on everyone's mind has been this: What will they do with the fifth Call of Duty? The answer, we know now, is a return to World War II. But rather than a step backward, Call of Duty: World at War is shaping up to be a unique take on this familiar timeline. With part of the campaign set in the often-overlooked Pacific theatre and plenty of inspiration drawn from Modern Warfare--both technical and creative--developer Treyarch is aiming to prove there's still life left in the World War II shooter.


Get ready for a darker narrative.

The most immediately apparent of the inspirations drawn from Modern Warfare is the mature, at times brutal form of storytelling. World at War begins with your character tied up in a hut on the beach of the Makin Atoll. A Japanese officer stands in front of you, demanding information from a fellow marine. An uncooperative spit to the face later, the officer puts his lit cigarette out on the face of this bound soldier and uses a knife to put a particularly bloody end to his suffering. But before you meet with a similar fate, backup arrives and you stage your escape. Pistol in hand, you're ready to begin World at War's first level.

After the first few minutes of fighting on the Makin beach, which offers some impressive visuals of exploding huts and moonlit ocean water, the squad of marines makes its way into the unknown of a nearby jungle. This is where the similarity to previous Call of Duty gains begins to wane. One of Treyarch's biggest areas of focus with the new Pacific setting is to portray the Imperial Japanese as soldiers very much unlike the Germans, the foils that have long served as the only enemies in the series. Rather than the obvious change in appearance and language, Treyarch has given the Japanese a starkly different set of tactics for you to deal with. Under the Bushido code, the Imperial Japanese fight with more of a focus on guerilla warfare. The first example of this is after your group has trekked through the dark jungle, past a collection of dead bodies. But in actuality, these Japanese soldiers are only pretending to be dead; they quickly pop up and attack your squad from behind. Another example of this take-no-prisoners tactical style in the first level includes Japanese snipers intentionally wounding a soldier so others come rushing to his aid, then taking out the group while they're distracted.
( I bet no one will see this, cause there to lazy to read everything. )
One of the tools you're given to combat these guerilla tactics is the use of fire-based weaponry, a trick displayed in the next level we were shown. Enemy soldiers often hide in the tall grass and dense foliage, even going so far as to climb up into trees for the perfect sniping opportunity. In this second level, the US marines are charging through more open terrain, this time during daylight hours. But despite the openness, patches of tall grass and palm trees dot the path to your goal. When your squad happens upon these areas of potential concern, you'll need to take a flame thrower and douse the greenery with blazing fire. Sometimes nothing is there, but occasionally you'll see charred enemies pop up from the grass, frantically waving and firing their guns with each last bit of life. Likewise, shooting fire at a tree might result in seeing a body fall from the branches, dangling from the rope he'd previously tied to his ankle as a safety harness.


Flamethrowers will play a big part in combat with enemies frequently hiding in the grass.

Visually, this new form of weaponry really shows off some of the enhancements made to the impressive Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare engine being used in World at War. Modern Warfare's engine was already known for its beauty and brains under the hood, displaying stunning visuals while accurately rendering the effects of ballistics traveling through myriad surface materials. But now there's an element of environmental destruction added to the mix. When torching grass, you'll see the fire slowly chew away the lush vegetation as the ground blackens beneath it. The rope keeping a dead body tied to a tree can be shot away. Planks making up the walls of beachside huts can be sawed away with bullets. And to add to all of this, Treyarch has taken it upon themselves to give you the ability to swim, producing even more physics-related trickery like ripples from grenade explosions and bullets refracting when they strike the surface of the water.

This overarching goal of creating an altogether different World War II experience will carry over into multiplayer, as World at War will introduce a series first with co-op play. You'll be able to team up with friends with four-player online or two-player local connections. Treyarch is focusing on a natural stepping up in difficulty to compensate for the additional number of players. More than just increasing the hit points of enemies, the developer is working on ways to increase the size of battles and quality of enemy AI to provide a more challenging experience for your team of four. One of the big concerns we came away with is how it'll handle the dramatic, scripted moments that have become a series hallmark. It seemed to us like the teammate out in front would trigger these cinematic moments (planes crashing into view, enemies bursting out from hiding, and the like), while those dawdling behind would lose out on the Hollywood action. Treyarch, for its part, says this is a big area of focus in its testing process and it aims to have a solution when the game is released.

Competitive multiplayer, meanwhile, looks to be a bit more familiar. The system of persistent leveling and character perks used in Modern Warfare has been borrowed and enhanced with a number of new upgrades, like a flak jacket that helps protect you from grenade blasts. But not everything is strictly influenced by Modern Warfare. New to this game will be a squad system (a smaller group within the normal team) where spawns are highly influenced by where your squadmates are and cooperation is encouraged through a squad-only waypoint system. Vehicles will also make a return, though not the swift motorcycles and jeeps seen in Call of Duty 3. This time around the vehicle focus is on heavy-duty machinery like tanks and trucks. If Treyarch is able to pull off forming a cohesive experience out of all these elements and influences, the multiplayer experience should be quite the competitive powerhouse.


The ability to swim invites new potential for multiplayer mayhem.

While many shooter fans are understandably burned out on the World War II setting, the Pacific theatre section of the storyline is looking like an intriguing invitation back to the 1940s thanks to a palpable feeling of tension provided by the new focus on guerilla tactics. And the fact that they've adopted the wildly popular perk system from Modern Warfare's multiplayer system certainly doesn't hurt, either. We're looking forward to seeing how the rest of the campaign compares with the Pacific half. You can expect to see details on that front shortly. Call of Duty: World at War is scheduled for release later this year.


Swimming? That's what I always wanted to do when I play FPS.

[Jjjet1]

treyarch are you serious? bah i don't like them since they basically murdered cod 3 i still love cod 2.

[Trunks]

cod powering 007 lol, interesting

good post - and since doors are open for PC, that's probably my best bet to get the game

At least we will know that 007 will have good graphics.

[jakncoke]

treyarch are you serious? bah i don't like them since they basically murdered cod 3 i still love cod 2.

that's because Infinity Ward did COD2.

[Trunks]

This may be the best game treyarch made. It sounds like it will be pretty good (Then again I explained this above). It's using cod 4's engine so the graphics should be the same at the very least. New game play involving swimming and more use of the flame thrower. ( sounds fun huh ^^ )

[Jjjet1]

the trailer was not the best but it looked ok. the only reason i'll be buying this games is because it's call of duty. if it wasn't well... since treyarch made it. i wouldn't buy it. they better wow me with this game or i'll be like.. that's all?

[rukisuto]

Heh, they're already advertising on myspace.
Go figure, lol.