Activision previews Call of Duty: Ghosts for Xbox One

-It's been 10 years. You start to forget the things you should remember. And you can't stop remembering the things you should forget. We've always had the power. Not anymore. All we have is each other. We're ghosts fighting for something that can't be killed. Soldiers stand against their enemies. The Ghosts hunter. -Call of Duty set the gold standard for first person action in the current gen and make no mistake, we're gonna do it again with Call of Duty: Ghosts for the Next-Gen. We've had a camera crew inside our iconic studio, Infinity Ward, capturing the creative process as the vision for this game is unfolded. And we wanted you to be the first to go behind the scenes and take a look at what they've been up to. -Here at Infinity Ward, we've had a great time crafting the benchmark of the modern day shooter on current gen. And we're really excited that we get to be the studio that brings Call of Duty into the next generation. We have a whole new story with brand new characters, completely new world. And this is powered by a new Next-Gen engine that gives us amazing graphic fidelity and really innovative new ways to play the game. So what we wanted to do is create a cast of characters that you really felt more emotionally attached to. We have the opportunity to work with Stephen Gaghan. This is the guy that won an Oscar for writing Traffic. The wrote and directed Syriana. What they really wanted in this game in Call of Duty: Ghosts is they wanted emotional reality. You know they wanted these characters to feel real, to feel like real people. So that story opens up with a mass event-- America's crippled, our military forces are devastated, our governments in disarray, and as the player you are actually the underdog fighting back against these superior forces. So the team you're a part of is formed from the remnants of all the US Special Forces. -Ghosts are our super elite fighting force like the Spartans all the way through SEAL Team Six. They've adopted every technique that's useful for modern urban guerilla style fighting. -One of the fascinating new additions to your squad is a dog. We've had dogs in Call of Duty before, but never like this. This is someone you care about. This is a squad member. He does everything from sniffing out explosives to protecting the team. So with this next Call of Duty, being in the new world on a whole new storyline, one of the things that we wanna do to support that was create a new engine. -Our goal of this game is to make brand new Next-Gen characters and weapons that's never been seen before in Call of Duty games. We have a new tech in the game, Sub-D. The idea is the closer you get to it the more it tries to maintain any curvature that you see. This is very helpful on weapons, helmets for characters, and makes a huge difference for visual fidelity at what the player sees from a distance as well as close up. -With the new Next-Gen console, this is an opportune time for us to reinvent the experience that we deliver. It's important to keep our core philosophies about game played drive tech. -So when I think about the animation features that we've been working out for Call of Duty: Ghosts, the first thing as it come to mind is immersion. We have a new mantle system so that when you're running quickly and you hit a wall, you get this nice boom. You hit it and you leap and you go. And you just maintain your momentum. And we have the lean feature this allows to you lean out and lean in and get a better view of the battlefield. So another featured, the walk-in with animation is to slide. It allows you to get someone quickly, get out of the line of fire, and at the same time doing it in really cool looking way. We've added fluid dynamics, interactive smoke, and also added an AI system to it. So we have fish move out of the way when you get close to them. -The polycounts, the texture increases, the shaders, the lighting tech, the level should feel like you're really there, and all the technologies going in to it allows you to achieve those goals. -With this being an all new Call of Duty, we've really taken this opportunity to revamp multi-player. One of these new MP features that I'm most excited about is dynamic maps. We have everything from big earthquakes and floods down to player driven actions, doors, explosive traps, things that change the flow of the map. All of this creates a new dynamic experience for the player. Another new feature is character customization. You can choose the heads, you could choose the bodies, you can choose the helmet and gear that you're wearing. You can connect with who you are as a player more so than we've ever done in the past. Dynamic maps and character customization are just two of the new innovations that we're bringing to Next-Gen multi-player. -We have the best fans in the world and we're committed to creating for them a new next generation Call of Duty experience. One of the key reasons Call of Duty has been as successful as it is, is we focus on game play. It's the thing we designed for. It's the thing that drives our success as a franchise. And with all of the new tech, all of the new storyline, everything that we're putting into this next generation Call of Duty, we are still 60 frames a second, low latency controls, a great feeling game. -This will be the most beautiful Call of Duty game we've ever made. It will also be the most character driven and emotionally engaging Call of Duty game we've ever made. And it will be the best Call of Duty game we've ever made. A stunning leap forward, not just for this franchise, but also for console gaming. To show you what I mean, we put together a little comparison video that shows you what's possible on the Next-Gen and put side by side the differences between what were gonna be delivering in Call of Duty: Ghosts and what was in Infinity Ward's last game, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 which is state of the art, just a very short time ago. And when you look at the differences side by side, it's actually pretty stunning. Let's take a look. -This sequence shows one of Modern Warfare 3's main characters, Price. While this asset pushed the limits of what was capable of the time. The technology employed by the new engine allows us to take the visual fidelity of our models to a whole new level. This next generation had is modeled with multiple features represented. Sub-D, high-resolution textures, subsurface skin shaders, multiple lights, and self casting shadows. Here you can see the dog model from Modern Warfare 3. Our new dog model has taken from high-resolution scans of an actual Seal Team service dog. Every detail replicated. Right down to the scars on the nose and the tattoo inside here. When playing first person action games, your characters arms are one of the most looked at visual elements. The arms in MW3 were beautiful at the time. But the new engine allows for a significantly increased texture resolution. This advancement in technology allows us to convey fine hairs, bruising, cuts, and even the dirt beneath the fingernails. Here's an example of a jungle environment from Modern Warfare 3. Now here's the jungle environment from Ghosts. This scene employs many new tech features including volumetric lighting, boosted polycount, and self casting shadows.