The first official details about the sequel to the immensely successful Call of Duty franchise have been making the rounds today. As rumored, and unlike CoD 4: Modern Warfare, the next game, entitled Call of Duty: World at War, will take place during World War II. Again.
One of the possible reasons for the revert is that Infinity Ward will not be developing CoD 5 but instead CoD 3 developer Treyarch will be taking the reigns once again. The game is being built around the CoD 4 engine however, so a similar look and feel to the game can be expected.
World at War will take place in the Pacific Theater of World War II and according to OXM, for the first time in a CoD game, 4-player cooperative play will be available in the campaign mode by using four consoles over Xbox LIVE or two consoles each with split-screen. The enemy AI is also said to be totally different, and you can expect the Japanese soldiers you fight to attack from inside trees, or even try kamikaze attacks on you. “We figured out early that the Imperial Japanese fought in a different way that was full of suspense,” creative lead Rich Farrelly said. “From that point we started to skew the game in that direction.”
The game is also pretty damn gritty by the sounds of it, that according to UK-based magazine playTM: “The opening scene of the first level we are shown is a Japanese commander stubbing a cigarette out in the eye of a prisoner before slitting his throat – the blood splatters and dribbles down the side of the tent you are being held in. He turns towards you to deal out the same treatment but help arrives just in time. Cue a daring level-long escape.” Mark Lamir, the head of Treyarch even said the level of grittiness “quite frankly made some people very uncomfortable.”
As for multiplayer, vehicles can be used as well as more efficient squad-based tactics. The more popular Perks from CoD 4 will be making a return and new, time period relevant ones will be added, giving you that slight edge over the competition. Swimming underwater, available in both single-player as well as online, is also something new to the series. And yes, that’s a flamethrower you see in the image above.
The game is still deep in development without a release date but what’s known is that it will be released for the 360, PS3, PC, and Wii. The Wii version apparently takes advantage of the Wii Zapper and is being worked on by a separate team within Treyarch.
Now that the magazines have had their exclusives, we don’t expect it to be too long until Activision starts releasing some good quality screenshots for us Internet people.
