According to Infinity Ward producer Mark Rubin, the developer isn’t concerned with pushing technology with their upcoming first person shooter Modern Warfare 3. Speaking in a round table discussion during Call of Duty XP last weekend, he explained that Modern Warfare 3 is all about the gameplay.
Speaking in regards to Infinity Ward’s game development philosophy, Rubin stated:
It isn’t about how fancy your engine is, but more about pushing gameplay more than anything else and letting tech follow. For instance, when it came time to design the single-player campaign for Modern Warfare 3, one of the things we wanted to do was have the game exist in cities that people were familiar with. So the previous CoDs were all over the world and they were real exotic, but they weren’t places that anyone that played the game would be at or go to.
He continued:
In MW3, its big cities – New York, London, Germany, Paris; it’s places that people have been or live in currently. When you see the game and its story unfold in your city, that’s a big deal. And just because it’s in a big city doesn’t mean it’s not a big deal. Cities, from a technology stand-point, posed a different problem from your standard small villages in the middle of Middle-east or Russia. The landscapes have to be built out further, geometry and buildings that we never had to worry about are all of a sudden a problem, so there is a lot of tech that goes into being able to do these big cities.
Rubin also shared details concerning upgrades that have been made to the Modern Warfare 3 engine:
We couldn’t just take MW2, and put a bunch of big buildings in it – there was a lot of tech that went into it – so that just shows you one example of how the design drove a tech feature that we didn’t have in the past. Not necessarily what’s the newest, hottest, cool shader, pixilation or sunlight; that kind of thing. We didn’t really go that path. Gameplay is the most important thing we care about and tech will support that.
The latest Modern Warfare 3 screenshots and trailers have been circulating around the internet, with some noting that the game looks very similar to Modern Warfare 2. Battlefield 3, on the other hand, is running on DICE’s brand new Frostbite 2 engine, and looks noticeably better.
