Geek Swagger.
World at War
The Call of Duty franchise is easily one of my favorites in the video game industry, going as far back as the original which was a PC-exclusive that revolutionized World War 2 shooters on the platform. Though traditionally a World War 2 franchise the game's developer, , decided to branch out into the 21st century with the latest game in the series titled . CoD4 was hugely successful in part because of its move to the modern-day Middle East, but also because of the ridiculous amount of polish applied to the gameplay, graphics, and sound for both the single player campaign and the multiplayer portion of the game.
For all those reasons and more I have been eagerly anticipating the announcement of the fifth game in the series, and in the past couple weeks I'm pleased to announced that we finally saw the trailer for . The franchise is moving back to the classic World War 2 setting. A lot of people are bent out of shape about that but honestly I love everything about WW2 so I think it's great. It seems like the most common complaint about World War 2 games is that there have already been a million of them, but haven't there already been a million modern warfare games as well? What makes World at War a genuinely unique experience is that this time the game will play out in the Pacific theater of the war. There has yet to be, to my mind anyways, a truly great game based on the Pacific theater so I'm very excited about this, and if anyone can get it right it's the guys that have been working with the franchise for years.
Who are those guys, you ask? Not Infinity Ward, makers of Call of Duty 1, , and Call of Duty 4. Instead the honor gets passed to a different developer - . Treyarch put out the sequel to the original Call of Duty game called which, to my mind, is still one of the best CoD games ever. They were also behind the less heralded Call of Duty 3 as well as some console off-shoots of the series (, for example). There's been a lot of fuss made over the fact that Treyarch will be working on Call of Duty 5 and not Infinity Ward, but I think that's very unwarranted. First off, they know Call of Duty. Secondly they know World War 2 games. Thirdly they always capitalize on the multiplayer portion of the game ( multiplayer trumped 2's easily, and World At War is set to bring co-op action to the series for the first time). I kind of look at Treyarch like the little engine that could, people get down on them a lot and tend to sleep on their games which invariably end up great. Besides, this also allows Infinity Ward to start prepping for Call of Duty 6, and the more time they put into that game the better it'll be. I don't think there was ever a game developer who said "we just had too much time to put this game together."
After viewing the Call of Duty: World at War reveal trailer my anticipation grew immensely. The action this time seems much more gritty, and portrays the darker side of the war better from what I can tell. There also seems to be a bit of a play to both sides of the war, not just the Allied Forces. During the beginning of the trailer you hear a Japanese soldier speaking (as well as an American) about the horrors of war and it's very chilling. If you have seen the movie and especially its counterpart you'll know exactly what I'm talking about. A reader was gracious enough to provide an embed of the worldwide reveal trailer, so please take a look for yourself:
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| Print article | This entry was posted by dmkemick on June 26, 2008 at 4:00 am, and is filed under Gaming News, Nintendo, PC, Playstation 3, Xbox 360. Follow any responses to this post through RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site. |
