Call Of Duty: Ghosts Preview – Creating A More Personal Experience

One of the things which turned me away from the Call of Duty franchise was the story of Modern Warfare 2. I haven’t played a Call of Duty since finishing the muddled and messy plot of that game, even as it has switched to the Cold War, near future and so on.

So no, I can’t really talk about Modern Warfare 3 or Black Ops, but it’s clear to me that Infinity Ward want to change things up, and create a deeper, more involved story and setting for Ghosts.

It starts with a brand new universe and cast of characters, with a near-future setting that sees the USA’s waning power in contrast to the ascendancy of South America’s Federation. This isn’t your Star Trek-like goodie two shoes Federation, and an uneasy peace descends into all out war and backstabbing, which sees the USA fall.

It’s an early turning point in the story, which depicts and sets up the jump forwards in time by ten years. The treaty between North and South is backed up by a key element of military and technological superiority of the ODIN space programme, much as the Cold War was kept cold by the nuclear stalemate.

The USA’s Orbital Defence Initiative doesn’t use nuclear weapons, but large metal rods – as referred to in the trailer – which can be fired at a point on the earth and cause nuclear-scale destruction without the fallout, smashing into the earth like a meteorite crossed with a railgun. It’s a cool weapon, but the Federation are able to turn it back on the USA, in a space-based set piece which should deliver the punch to the plot that No Russian and the London bombing did, without the over-the-top controversy.

It’s smart, spectacular and I like it, as it gives Logan and Hesh, two brothers at the heart of the main story – developed in deep collaboration with Stephen Gaghan, most famous for writing Traffic and Syriana – a deeper background when the game skips forward ten years. They were just teenagers when these catastrophic events destroyed their world, with the Federation invading and taking control of large parts of North America.

Knowing where these characters have come from, seeing what has shaped their lives and the reason for their war will help to create a deeper connection to the player. Soon they will be fighting as part of the Ghosts, a clandestine unit who hide their identities behind masks, so that they can lead the guerrilla war which the US has had to resort to.

In the wake of the ODIN strikes, much of the US infrastructure was wiped out. They no longer have the military superiority of being able to call for satellite imagery, and it’s these guerrilla tactics which will form a core part of the game.

It will inevitably set you into situations which feel familiar, with covert operations always a core part of Call of Duty’s tightly scripted single player stories, however, it could be that evolutionary step towards a more considered, deep and – thinking back to MW2 – more coherent story.

Having played the multiplayer back at Gamescom, it was good to be able to drop back into this and see more of what it will offer after some pointers from the presentation.

For me, the destruction still feels somewhat subdued, but it’s certainly there. A huge KEM strike which levels a map stands in contrast to explosions which will rip chunks out of and even collapse buildings. It will take a while for players to adapt and realise the possibilities of each individual map, many of which will be much larger than before – just take the sprawling castle of Stonehaven, in the gallery above, as an example.

Furthering this are the tweaks and adaptions of the gameplay to what players want, and what the developers have observed in the game. Small things like having a knee-sliding animation, to cut out the strange look of switching from sprinting to prone in an instant, or adding dual-rendering to sniper scopes, so that you have an element of peripheral vision to better track targets.

Then there are the thirty new weapons, including the new Marksman class of rifle, designed to bring something akin to the M1 Garand to the game. They’ll deliver near-sniper levels of damage, but are designed to work best with iron or red-dot sights. They do seem to bring the downsides of a sniper rifle, too, with poor accuracy when not aiming down the sights, but I actually had quite a lot of fun with this class of weapon in my loadout.

That’s nothing compared to getting a hold of the Maniac perk on the Assault package – the nutter with the knife, above – which lets you call in a special suit of armour, for you to put on and then run around like, well, a maniac. All you have is a knife to hand, but you have much more armour on, and can get in for the kill even as someone unloads a full clip into you.

Thankfully maniacs won’t regenerate health, so they’ll die eventually, but it’s ridiculously silly to run and stab about 8 or 9 people in a row. I was laughing to myself for a good few minutes as I did so.

The biggest change to the multiplayer comes in the form of Squads, though, where you are able to curate a collection of complimentary loadouts as actual characters. Make them look how you want, give them names, level and prestige them up, and then take them into battle as friendly AI.

Squads lets you fight offline against other AI squads, either on your own with your AI backing you up – their style of play dependent on their loadouts – or in co-op play alongside friends. You can even lead your squad against another player with their squad. It’s an interesting idea, and one which will let you play offline and still collect some experience and rank up; it lets those not so fond of the hyper-competitive online play see everything the multiplayer has to offer.

Rounding out the package, no next-gen title would be complete without some sort of companion app, and Ghosts is going to deliver one courtesy of Beachhead Studios. It’s good to see them pushing beyond having the usual statistics, social networking and glorified menu systems, and develop a kind of meta-game to sit on top of and alongside the main multiplayer.

If you’re playing in a clan, you will be matched up with rival clans on a fortnightly basis, but do not need to fight against them directly. Instead it tallies up the individual game victories of all a clan’s players, and lets you fight for buildings and locations on a map. Once you control something, you’ll have to work to defend it from more than just your opponents, then by the end of the fortnight, the team with control of the majority of the map will win.

I reckon that sums up Ghosts quite nicely for me. The solid foundations at the core of the experience remain intact, and fans of the series would not want them to disappear. However, through a new graphics engine on next-gen hardware, a fresh plot and setting which can deepen the story which Ghosts will deliver and more options for how you want to play multiplayer, this looks to be a good step forward for the franchise.

Call of Duty: Ghosts’ Multiplayer is going to be playable at Eurogamer Expo this weekend. Judging by what they showed at Gamescom, you can expect to see Search & Rescue and Blitz game modes on a small selection of maps, as well as a snapshot of the extensive character customisation options.