There is some good in this, though – while the leaks were comprehensive, detailed and hugely disappointing for Activision, it’s a testament to just how bloody cool the action set-pieces in Modern Warfare are that I still left Activision’s Pre-E3 showcase in London impressed with the game even though I’d already heard all about the levels shown in the leaks.
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Shown on a big-screen to a group of journalists looking to save themselves some time at E3, we were first shown a cool introductory video that quickly recapped the events of the first two Modern Warfare titles. This new game picks up right where the second left off, with Captain Price and Soap on the run and a huge war raging in the USA between America and the Russia.
Infinity Ward’s Roboert Bowling was on hand to explain exactly where the studio was taking the Modern Warfare sub-series with their new partners Sledgehammer Games, who have presumably been called in to fill the void the mass exodus at Infinity Ward after Modern Warfare 2 shipped left.
Modern Warfare 3 is all about “scale to an entirely new level,” Bowling tells the crowd – and players will cross the globe heading to locales like London, New York, Russia, Africa and even the Himelayas.
For our demo, we got to see two missions hands-off – both of which take place in two of the most famous cities in the developed world. The first level, titled “Black Tuesday”, sees US Marines battling in a ruined New York City against Russian troops, fighting through Wall Street and the financial district to take out a radio tower.
The second level, “Mind the Gap”, takes place in London, and has an SAS squad trying to stop a deadly payload of chemical weapons from being delivered into a London dock. Soon everything goes a bit off the rails both literally and metaphorically, what was meant to be a stealth takedown of the terrorists leading into a desperate chase through the London underground.
The action looks pure Call of Duty, and exactly what one has come to expect from Infinity Ward’s COD outings. Everything still runs at 60 frames a second and all the basic features you’ll remember from Modern Warfare 1 and 2 are still there. Mostly impotent allies still fight alongside you and scream and holler for dramatic effect, and the gameplay seems to be following a formula of “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” – which you can hardly blame Infinity Ward and Sledgehammer for, given sales.
What is new to Modern Warfare 3 is a sense of larger scale. While not technically accurate the depictions of New York and London are clever in their filmic quality – they evoke the right images and push the right buttons to give the impression of being the place it claims to be, even though in truth the skyline and buildings in both only bear a passing resemblance to the real one.
That movie-like quality passes over into the gameplay, which will have you fighting ground troops but also blasting enemy soldiers out of guns on APUs and getting dragged into ridiculously elaborate but awesome action sequences, including one which has two attack helicopters facing off and ends with yours almost crashing, the player character clinging to the inside of the chopper as the pilot regains control.
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Even the slightest of animations seems to have been engineered for the maximum cinematic awesomeness – the New York level had the player character toting a gun with both an ACOG and Red Dot Sight scope which could be switched between on the fly. Even that tiny animation looked super slick.
The moment-to-moment action is almost always edge-of-your-seat, and the demo we were shown culminated in the London level where the SAS forces race after the terrorists in a commandeered jeep – but the terrorists have now hijacked a London Underground Train.
The train hurtles through stations packed with civilians who scream and cower from the gunfire while the player fires from the back of the jeep. The train carries on, into the old, famous abandoned underground stations, untouched since World War II – until eventually everything comes to a head and there’s a horrible, metal-crunching crash as the train derails and flips within the confines of the tunnel.
Everything looks extremely cool, and while Modern Warfare 3 might not be as pretty as Battlefield 3 from what we’ve seen, the engine has definitely been tightened up significantly since the previous outing and most important of all that 60 frames a second frame rate has been held onto solidly. Textures seem to be overall sharper, and little details – like the manufacturer of the scope you’re using – seem to be better defined than in past titles.
There’s some lovely visual flair in places – the Wall Street level has you entering the stock exchange and fighting through the screen-filled floor, which displays long out of date stocks and shares, abandoned upon invasion. As a gunfight ensues in the race to get to the roof of the building, screens shatter and smash and short all around you.
The SAS level, meanwhile, offers up pouring rain (it is England, after all) and the dead of night, complete with lots of searchlights and the familiar-but-incorrect London skyline, the buildings of Canary Wharf lit up beautifully in the distance. Car lights flash and car alarms go off as the battle nears them. It all looks and sounds terribly cool, and wonderfully filmic.
With the visual demo concluded, Bowling lays out a few more things about the game – noting that it will have Single Player, co-operative Spec Ops mode (which he promises will be beefier this time around) and of course the suite of Multiplayer modes and features that made Call of Duty into a gaming phenomenon.
Bowling goes on to explain that cinematic gameplay is a “major element in this single player,” driving home just how important making you feel awesome is to the team behind Modern Warfare 3 – perhaps even more so than changing the gameplay significantly.
The single player seems to bring more of what Modern Warfare did best – the story-focused, set-piece driven experience which makes you feel like a badass but also provides you with the necessary tools and skills to head into multiplayer keyed-up.
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It’s always difficult to call much about a game without physically getting one’s own hands on a game, but what I saw of Modern Warfare 3 left me eager to play the single player campaign in a dark room with a big fat surround system. Multiplayer reveals will be coming over the summer.
There’s a lot riding on Sledgehammer and Infinity Ward’s efforts with modern Warfare 3 with some claiming the Call of Duty bubble is set to burst, as with Guitar Hero. Whatever the case, Bowling is clear that they’re taking this seriously. “The expectation from the fans is nothing compared to the expectations we’ve put on ourselves,” he says.
