Many Train2Game students are looking forward to the release of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 later this year. The franchise is arguably the biggest in gaming and is predicted to beat the impressive sales records of the previous Call of Duty titles.

In an interview with The Guardian, Infinity Ward’s Mark Rubin discussed a lot about the development behind Modern Warfare 3, including some of the new features which may be of interest to Train2Game students.

From a development point of view, Infinity Ward has added the ability to make changes to the game simpler.

“One of the big things we’ve changed is the ability to alter the game post-launch. That doesn’t sound like a cool feature, it sounds simple – it’s like ‘why can’t you just release patches?” said Producer Mark Rubin.

“Well, games don’t work that way – you can patch some things, but for others, it’s a significant deal, patching is not broad enough to do everything in the game.”

So one behind-the-scenes feature allows us to update files, sometimes without even doing a full patch – we can just tweak things like weapon balance, which we could never do before” he explained

“In the past, we’d put out a game and realise, ‘hmm, that’s weapon’s really over-powered’ but there was nothing we could do about it. I mean, with twenty million people playing the game, you learn more in the ten minutes after release than you do in months of pre-launch playtesting. So that tech feature was a big thing for us.”

The Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 producer also explained how the game engine had to be changed in order for Infinity Ward to build big, sprawling cities instead of desert locations.

“And also for single-player, our engine is very performance orientated – it’s all about keeping 60 frames-per-second, it’s all about fluidity, the feel of the game; we want you to forget you’re even holding a controller, that’s the key goal.” said Rubin.

So then design came to us and said, we want to stop doing these little villages in Russia or the Middle East, we want to go big, we want to go to the places that people live in, we want it on the streets that people walk down when they go to work.

“But it’s not as simple as just ‘oh yeah, go build London’. There was a lot of engine re-writing in order to make a big city work in our environment, in our technology, and still work at 60FPS” he added.

The full interview makes an interesting read for Train2Game students and is available on The Guardian Games website.

As previously reported by the Train2Game blog, the most popular community created multiplayer modes could find their way into the full game.

So Train2Game, what are your thoughts on the behind the scenes tweaks to Modern Warfare 3? Will it impact on the gameplay?

Leave your comments here on the Train2Game blog, or on the Train2Game forum.

[Source: The Guardian]