Next month’s release of Call of Duty : Modern Warfare 3 uses the same engine that Infinity Ward developed for the First Modern Warfare, 5 Call of Duty games ago. sure, the engine’s been refined and upgraded, but many gamers still think the series is in need of a flashy new hunk of code to power the series.
Glen Schofield – who created Dead Space before leaving to form Sledgehammer games, the co-developer of Modern Warfare 3 disagrees and has defended the choice to keep using the same engine. Why? It’s a Porsche, he says.
"I’ve worked on a lot of engines over my lifetime and spent a lot of time putting graphics in to them and this thing is Porsche," he said to CVG. "And what I mean by that is that it is stream-lined, everything in it is perfectly freaking clean. You can tell it’s been worked on for years. It’s easy to upgrade.
"We worked with engines before that are like f****** spaghetti. You can’t work on a part and put it back in without messing with everything else. Modern Warfare 3’s levels now are so much bigger than the old ones because they go more vertically, they have a bigger footprint and on top of that, higher fidelity, more textures and a lot more detail."
According to Schofield, the engine is constantly updated, and the upgrades will be evident when Modern Warfare 3 ships next month.
"Look at all the character models, look at all the gun models, look at the reflections, look at the water. There is so much that we’ve added, so when someone says ‘cut and paste’, I don’t even want to talk to them because they don’t know. They just don’t know. They have no idea." “I’ve said this before – I’m not shipping an engine, I’m shipping a game," he concluded. "So that’s why I’m going to talk about the game. You can talk about your engine all you want. It’s not fun."
It’s not old, it’s mature! I still think the Modern Warfare engine is quite capable indeed, but with the improvements we’ve seen in Frostbite 2.0 – which power combat shooter competitor Battlefield 3, maybe it is time to start thinking about new engine for Call of Duty.
Last Updated: October 18, 2011
