Ever since Call of Duty Ghosts’ gameplay was revealed at the Xbox One announcement, people have been knocking on CODGhosts’ graphics. Most people think the CODGhosts doesn’t look “Next Gen,” even when IW made a comparison video to show the leap in tech and/or graphics. OPM conducted an interview with Infinity Ward to set the record straight about Call of Duty graphics and tech…
Infinity Ward’s Zach Volker explained why they’re building on an old engine:
Developing a new engine comes out of a necessity of something. So it comes out of necessity of what we have now is an open bandwidth that can accept more things going on and so maybe the current engine can’t push that. Or it comes out of a certain particular feature that we want to create that we haven’t been able to in the past. So looking at our current situation, focusing more on the next generation of hardware, we are now going to have the bandwidth to build many more things and our engine just can’t handle as much as we’d like to throw at it right now. And that necessitated the need to go onto a new engine. It’s a fine line when you define a new engine, and augmentations to an engine. What you want to be careful of is making too much of a distinction of a new engine. As we develop and we add features, at what point does it become a new engine? Because it’s impossible to develop a new engine from the ground up in a two year cycle. You would need an army of 200 engineers. So what we do is we say ‘okay what are the things that are significant and that we would say that are encompassing of the engine or its visual quality? Are those being upgraded in a significant way? Alright then, I think that warrants that we’ve got a new engine on our hands.
If you’d like to read the entire transcript of the above video, check the interview at Official PlayStatioon Magazine‘s article.
