Call Of Duty: Ghosts – now with added aliens

GameCentral talks to the executive producer of the new Call Of Duty about sequels, 3D multiplayer, and why the PS4 version of Ghosts looks the best…

Considering the sheer number of people involved in making a modern video game it’s relatively rare that we get to speak to the same person twice about a single game. But by what we assume to be coincidence we’ve spoken to Mark Rubin three times during the creation of Call Of Duty: Ghosts. First when the game was originally unveiled at E3, when the multiplayer was first made playable to the public at Gamescom, and now most recently just hours after completing the finished game for ourselves.



As always he proved an agreeably honest and forthright interviewee, as we discussed the specifics of the new game, the affects of Call Of Duty on the games industry and pop culture at large, and possible plans for the future. In fact we were talking for so long we’ve had to edit out various digressions, including our own personal fantasy about being invited to a Star Wars PR event where we’d get the chance to physically attack J. J. Abrams.

Rubin’s most controversial moments though come when he discussed exactly why the PlayStation 4 version of Ghosts runs at a higher resolution than the Xbox One version. Or rather his embarrassment at not being allowed to explain…


CLICK HERE TO READ THE CALL OF DUTY: GHOSTS REVIEW

GC: How much of your job now is answering these stupid questions from games journos?

MR: [laughs]

GC: Because I’ve spoken to you three times now for this game and that’s a lot.

MR: Yeah, it is. These game more than any other I’ve been doing more and more. I don’t think of it as my primary job, but I think PR is always better when a dev is answering questions rather than a… spokesperson. Which is what we used to have in the past, whether it be a community manager or something like that. But yeah, a huge amount of my time has been taken up by events like this. But at the same time it is fun, it’s fun to see people talk about the game and react to it…

GC: I particularly enjoyed our last conversation at Gamescom, in fact I ended up quoting you in my Pokémon X and Y review.

MR: [laughs] Pokemon? I’m gonna have to read this now!

GC: Well, it was because of one of your comments about making sequels to long-running franchises, and how they all have the same problem: that they can’t change because, as you said, they’d then become something completely different. Which I think is a very fair point.

MR: [laughs]That’s awesome!

GC: So I’ve just finished Ghosts’ single-player campaign and my initial reaction is of being very glad that someone has at last acknowledged Moonraker as being a gravely underappreciated movie.



MR: [laughs] That was a fun moment. It was an obvious nod, but without having to…

GC: Well there’s almost no other way to show that sort of sequence, which is why I genuinely think people are unfair about the ‘James Bond in space’ stuff. Apart from the lasers, which you don’t have, I think they tried to make it as realistic as possible.

MR: Yeah! I mean most of the outer space battles could’ve been anything, not necessarily Moonraker, but that one opening scene of the astronauts coming out of the shuttle is a direct lift from Moonraker. It was there as a nod.

GC: Was Gravity also a nod? It seems unlikely you knew about it that early on?

MR: Yeah, we’d done everything before we even knew Gravity existed.

GC: So they’re copying you?

MR: Yes! That’s it. [laughs] A great coincidence though, because it really adds to when people who have seen the movie play that part of the game. It adds to the experience and makes it better.

GC: But speaking seriously you must’ve been worried that people wouldn’t accept the outer space stuff. That they’d think it was too silly and that you’d jumped the shark.

MR: It was a concern in early conception but once we started actually doing it we felt like, ‘It feels really cool!’ There’s nothing… it’s not made up. Weapons actually work better in space than they do on Earth.


GC: I know, a couple of us were just debating that with a disbelieving journo.

MR: Bullets work great in space. And guns fire in space just fine, they fire in vacuums because the oxidant to fire a bullet is in the gunpowder. It’s the saltpetre that’s in gunpowder that’s where the bullet gets all its oxygen from, so it can be in a vacuum and you can fire really easily. So you can actually fire more efficiently in space than you do on the ground.

GC: It reminds me of the sort of conversations I had with the Black Ops II guys, where they were worried people wouldn’t accept what were clearly perfectly plausible predictions of future technology. But then that’s the problem with technology, where the layman often dismisses it as nonsense or irrelevant, right up until the moment before it becomes commonplace.

MR: Yep! It’s funny too on that note, we talked to a lot of military advisers. A lot of guys who have done some crazy stuff. And a lot of times they tell us, ‘Well, this has happened once blah blah blah’ and we’re like ‘Wow! That’s absolutely crazy and there’s no way we would put that in the game because people would never belive it, even though it actually happened and it’s absolutely true’. People just wouldn’t believe us, it would be too much of stretch. Which is amazing…

GC: It’s the whole truth is stranger than fiction adage.


MR: Exactly.

GC: I have to say though that I did find a lot of the chapters in the first half of the campaign quite formulaic. I have personally assaulted a number of oil rigs and snowy fortresses in my time and I’m not sure I really want to do any more. And yet everything after about the halfway mark was a lot more inventive – more outlandish, more video-gamey. I assume that’s all to some grand plan? I mean I doubt the early levels are necessarily done first? They certainly aren’t in a movie.

MR: No, they’re not and they’re not in the game either. Basic pacing is prologue to…

GC: But it wasn’t just pacing. It was more an increasingly uncaring attitude to how plausible it all was, which I was all for.

MR: [laughs] I mean we’re generally trying to differentiate the acts, in a sense. Differentiate the beginning, where you’re more character orientated, to the ‘let’s ratchet up the Micheal Bay moments and really ratchet up the wow moments’. Because we always have to think about trying to top the last game. Even in the game you get a bit of a feeling of levels trying to top the previous levels. So, it’s a mixed bag of that but pacing does sort of… you want it to go sort of like this [mimes a smoothly curving upwards graph]. And so to get to some of those big bombastic moments we do crazy stuff like tank battles through sat farms.

Call Of Duty: Ghosts – dogs in space?

GC: I don’t want insult any writers but I get the impression you were less concerned about the plausibility or details of the story this time. I assume that was purposeful: you wanted two technologically advanced armies fighting and who cares why they’re doing it. Unless I missed it the game never explained why everyone in South America had suddenly turned into genocidal maniacs?

MR: [laughs] Nah, it didn’t. But we sort of explained why they’re powerful, just not why they’re upset. But you could read into today’s news and say Venezuela hates our guts, so maybe if one day they got to a point where they were powerful enough to do something about it they might…

GC: But my general point is were you less concerned, this time more than ever, with being a serious military simulator?

MR: The key thing has always been about storytelling and not worrying about technological accuracy or being an authentic military shooter per se. We try to ground everything in authenticity, in the sense that if we do something… so a great for instance I remember is the scene from Modern Warfare 3 where you have to go up to the submarine and plant the explosives to make it surface. That mission we asked a Navy SEAL how would you get on a submarine that’s underwater? And he told us and that’s what we did in-game. So even though that felt like a massive Michael Bay moment it was based on real tactics.

GC: I do remember a magazine article once and they were getting Andy McNab to rate the realism of various games and he actually put Metal Gear Solid pretty high. He told some story about being chased across a field and hiding in an upturned animal trough as everyone walked past him, which of course in the game seems ludicrous…

MR: That’s pretty funny, I never would have picked Metal Gear Solid as a realistic… anything! [laughs]

GC: Well, that’s kind of what I’m getting at, you’re caught in this trap where you have to be more mundane, almost less realistic, just to make people belive it’s plausible.

MR: Sometimes, yeah. I know we look at our single-player specifically as trying to be a great action summer blockbuster film kind of thing, so we want to be able to put the player in a situation where they get a big grin on their face and say, ‘Oh wow, that was so cool!’ That’s what we’re looking for. If that means breaking a bit of the boundary of reality… okay! It’s fun first… the experience should be fun, it’s not a history lesson. And we’ll definitely always go for cinematic value over authentic value.

GC: Do you think there’s a general problem that video games take themselves too seriously nowadays? I think back to something like Duke Nukem 3D and as silly it was things like shrink guns and ice guns… they added a lot of variety and fun to the game. Is there no way to get that sort of stuff back into mainstream games? Not specifically those weapons but that gameplay-first, realism-second mentality.

MR: To answer the question in a general sense I think it’s like movies, it’s a very easy analogy: some movies take themselves seriously and some don’t and that’s the key to the industry as a whole. We are an entertainment product, that’s what we do. We’re here to entertain people, whether that’s giving them something serious or whether it’s pure bombastic fun. Is it a black and white art film or is it a summer blockbuster? Both are films, both have their place, and it’s one of those things where I feel like if every movie was a blockbuster and there were no art films, or there were no comedies, or anything else I think movies as a whole would be pretty rough. [laughs]

But that’s something from a storytelling point… Extinction is aliens invading…. You don’t have to explain why.

GC: They’re aliens! No one likes aliens!

MR: No one likes aliens! Don’t explain it just go with it, embrace the whatever-it-is-you’re-trying-to-do and go for it. There are still movies and games like that but a lot of times I have felt that a movie or a game or a book has been ruined by the fact that they do spend a bunch of time trying to overexplain… that they’re almost trying to be apologetic through the whole thing. Don’t apologise, just do it!

GC: Exactly! But that’s why I wondered whether you were purposefully addressing that, or whether it was just subconscious.

MR: I think it’s subconscious. I think if you go back to some of the earlier stories they were trying to recreate real experiences. If you think about where we started – World War II – we were recreating real situations. So that’s where we started and I think as we keep developing, and I haven’t really thought of this till now, but we do keep breaking away from trying to be a real thing and just have fun. And I think that’s how we’ve learned, and how every Call Of Duty becomes more and more successful, is that we remembered every time to concentrate on fun first.

GC: I think I must’ve dreamt this, as I can find no evidence for it online, but I swear I remember reading a story a few years ago where you were planning to put aliens or zombies into Modern Warfare 2. Is that something you’ve been meaning to do for a long time?

MR: Well, the whole third game mode really came from COD 4. COD 4 didn’t have a third game mode per se but what it did have is that airplane level at the end.

GC: The mile high club?

MR: Yeah, and that sort of became the blueprint for Spec Ops. And so Modern Warfare 2 it was Spec Ops, and then for Modern Warfare 3 we did Spec Ops again but we also added Survival mode. But it all kept it within the lore of the game. Whereas Zombies obvious delved away from that. And we didn’t want to do zombies specifically, that was Treyarch’s thing and they did a great job on creating that, and so when we started on this game we said, ‘Well, what do we want to do for our third game mode?’

And we tried to figure out a way to engage the player where it’s different from anything they’ve ever seen. Not just the visuals but the actual gameplay mechanics. Normally characters come towards you along the ground, taking cover and whatever. But we wanted to… we played with literally a blank level, just a box. And we experimented with enemies having different ways of moving around the map, so some of them were really fast along the ground, some would start jumping, and climbing over walls and coming over rooftops… all these cools ways of moving about the map.

And so we realised, ‘Well, this has never been done in Call Of Duty’, having things that you’re fighting like that. And then it was like, ‘Okay, we think the gameplay’s going to be really fun, now let’s figure out what that means’. And that’s when we thought, ‘Well the jumping and climbing on walls means some kind of creature, and obviously that probably means aliens’.

And then we started to build out the wrapper around it, and what the alien looked like… at first we only had one alien and then we thought it’d be really cool if we had aliens that did different things and had different abilities. And it just kind of grew and grew and grew. So It wasn’t really about, ‘Let’s come up with some aliens’, it was about ‘Let’s come up with some interesting and fun gameplay that feels interesting and different to anything else you’ve done in Call Of Duty.

GC: That’s really what I was speaking about with the Duke Nukem weapons: you’re thinking about gameplay first and then working out the context later.

MR: Yeah, yeah. Fun first.

GC: Do you see that ‘graph of pesudo-realism’ extending forever? Will each new game push more and more away from the military simulator angle?

MR: It could, it definitely could. It very well could. It’s not the way our designers think though. They take every game as, ‘What do we want to do?’ And it’s what’s fun for them to do as well as what we think’s fun for the player. I think someone had the idea that they wanted to see killer clowns.

GC: I think killer clowns are just about as unpopular as aliens.

MR: Yeah! [laughs]

GC: So obviously the ending of the single-player spelt out that there’s going to be a sequel, so does that mean you’ve already planned out a new trilogy?

MR: Not as much as you might think. We obviously made the ending… but a lot of that came from very close to the end of development. So it gives us a sort of stepping stone to the next game, but the full context of that story to come is being worked on as we speak. But no, it’s not fully planned out. It’s just seeding an idea, but we don’t know what the plant is going to look like in the end.

GC: Is it going to be a trilogy or just two games…?

MR: Don’t know. Actually don’t know. Until we start finishing up this story…

Call Of Duty: Ghosts – looking pretty on the next gen

GC: So in terms of the normal competitive multiplayer, I liked Grind, I like Cranked, and the maps were very good. But visually they didn’t seem very adventurous. Was there no thought to have multiplayer maps set in space or underwater, so you could have full 3D movement? Because that would be something genuinely new.

MR: Well, the dog would be difficult to do in outer space.

GC: Dogs have plenty of experience in outer space, they got there before us!

MR: [laughs] Okay, he’s got his little space helmet on but how is he going to bite you? [laughs] It’s funny, the multiplayer guys loved the idea of environments like that.

GC: Because then you can go all the way back to Quake, which is another thing that’s been lost.

MR: Yeah, yeah. But the grenades wouldn’t work exactly right, Kill Streaks wouldn’t work at all – can’t have a helicopter in outer space. Or a dog for that matter. [laughs] It does become a bit of a challenge.

GC: Challenges are good though, surely?

MR: No, challenges are good. There might be ways around it. Maybe it’s not just floating around in space, maybe it’s… I dunno inside the space station. It’s… who knows?

GC: Could it become DLC?

MR: It could. We could do it, but I don’t know… will it be fun? And this is the party pooper version of the answer: you have to measure effort versus payout. Would it be worth that amount of work? Which involves rewriting all the scripts for all the Kill Streaks, potentially creating new art assets for all the Kill Streaks – which would take months – to make one level that’s in space.

GC: The answer to that question is yes! It would be worth it.

MR: [laughs]

GC: The space levels got me thinking about all the rumours that you or Treyarch were going to do a space marine type game and this really convinced me it would work. You could play it straight, it doesn’t need to be Warhammer or have aliens even. But you could have levels with different gravity, different weapons and it would still be perfectly grounded in realism. Perhaps ironically, more so than the current games.

MR: Yeah. It makes sense. I wouldn’t count it out. Everything’s on the table. When we start a new game every possibility’s on the table. If we think that it’d be cool to have a battle over Jupiter, sure. Why not?

GC: The other thing I noticed from re-reading the Gamescom interview is how you were talking about Call Of Duty being the biggest game of the year, and yet that was before the hype for GTA V had really started. Do you look at the approach they take to sequels and wish you had that sort of time frame to work with?

MR: I love Rockstar for that, I have a ton of respect for them. I think they’re a great company, I think they’re very… just from a distance – I’ve never spoken to anyone from there before – but they seem to be very much, ‘This is who we are, this is what we do’ and not apologetic at all for anything. Which I completely appreciate, I mean I think it’s a great game.

GC: What affect do you think GTA V’s success is going to have on the industry? Apart from more GTA clones? Is it foolish to hope that their leisurely approach to sequels will take over from the current formula for yearly sequels?

MR: I don’t… I don’t know if it changes the formula per se. [takes long pause to consider] I don’t think it changes formula, I think that’s their formula…

GC: But it’s also Nintendo’s formula, or at least Nintendo when they’re not panicking.

MR: Right, right. Or Blizzard for that matter.

GC: Yeah, exactly. That’s not bad company to be in. If those three think it’s a good idea to take your time maybe there’s something in it? So why isn’t that the preferred model for everyone?

MR: Because there’s more than one way to skin a cat. Basically. Not that I enjoy skinning cats or encourage people to enjoy skinning cats. [laughs] But our system works for us, we have a rhythm for making a game. But that being said there are other methods for other people, besides the ones we’re talking about, and that works for them. In other words some companies put out the game and then they make their effort in supporting that game for a long period of time, selling DLC or whatever. There are different formulas to get to that magic point.

For me, the thing that I liked about the GTA launch was that it said to me said the industry, the games industry, is healthy. To me it meant there are still a large number of people, and a growing number of people, who play and love video games. And to me that was the positive that came out of that.

Mark Rubin – master of diplomacy

GC: But the negative interpretation of that is that it shows how bored and disillusioned people had become with everything else that’s been offered up in the last few years. I think many of this autumn’s sequels look all the more uninteresting as a result, as you realise they’re simply what the developer could get done in a year – not a real attempt to move the franchise forward.

MR: Yeah, yeah. So we have that formula of being able to put out games on a regular basis. It’s not a yearly thing from our perspective, from our perspective it’s two years [because they alternate releasing games each year with Treyarch – GC]. And that works for us.

But to your point there are companies out there who have been copying that formula – won’t name ’em because you already know exactly who they are – but it doesn’t necessarily work for them. And Rockstar, and also games like Skyrim, they have a different formula that does work for them. Neither formula is better than another but studios, actually publishers really, need to figure out that the Call Of Duty formula doesn’t work for everyone.

GC: I always assume it’s just some ivory tower exec making these decisions, not the developer themself.

MR: It generally is, to be honest.

GC: So, just finally, I have to ask: why does the PlayStation 4 version look so much better than the Xbox One? Is the resolution really the only difference?

MR: [laughs] Yep, it’s the only difference. The TVs are different on some of them, but… they both have their different rendering engines but they’re as close as possible. It really comes down to resolution. Xbox is upscaled 720, it’s outputting at 1080p but it’s upscaled from 720. Whereas PlayStation 4 is native 1080p. So that’s really the only graphical difference. But it is enough. Some people here are saying they don’t really notice a difference…

GC: Was that the guy with the white stick?

MR: [laugh] But yeah, the PS4 looks really good.

GC: Is the PC version still better?

MR: There’s actually some features that we’ve added to the PC that are definitively not on any other generation. We worked with Nvidia a lot with this, but we have a different form of anti-aliasing that’s really new and advanced – that isn’t on current or next gen. We have a fur shader on the dog and on the wolves, they actually have a moving fur shader that works really well, for PC. And the third one, which I think is one of the coolest ones, is we’re using Nvidia’s APEX Turbulence tech to have smoke that actually wisps and waves and moves out of the way of objects.

GC: So is that something the new consoles can’t do or you just didn’t have time to implement it?

MR: No, it’s… well, you can do almost anything, almost. Tessellation can’t be done on current gen for the most part, because it’s a DirectX 11 feature, but we could still do it but you’d get a frame rate of 2. So that really becomes the reason we do everything: the reason the Xbox One is 720, the reason the PlayStation 4 is 1080 is we’re trying to make the game look as good as it possible can and making sure we maintain our 60 frames per second.

We maintain the latency and the speed and the things that people actually care about. Even if they won’t admit it, the thing that makes Call Of Duty popular is how it feels, because of those priorities.

GC: So the obvious assumption from all this is that the PlayStation 4 is definitely more powerful than the Xbox One, is that true?

MR: [acting very embarrassed] I can’t answer that.

GC: You can’t answer it on a technical level or because you’re being diplomatic?

MR: Can’t answer that.

GC: You can’t say whether you’re avoiding the question for diplomatic reasons?

MR: [embarrassed] I just can’t say anything…

PR guy: It’s very hard for us to be…

GC: Are the console manufacturers leaning on you to avoid these sort of questions?

MR: [unsure – speaking to PR guy] I don’t know if that…

MR: [even more embarrassed to us] Yeah, there’s things that we… We sign NDAs with the first parties [i.e. Microsoft and Sony – GC] and there are things that we’re not allowed to talk about.

GC: So when John Carmack and Shinji Mikami say the Xbox One and PlayStation 4 are almost identical, is that something you could agree with?

MR: Hmm… I would say that’s a bit inaccurate but I wouldn’t be able to tell you any detail of why that’s inaccurate.

GC: For diplomatic reasons?

MR: Yes.

GC: Okay, that’s fine. I think we can all read between those lines. But that’s absurd, how can they not except any journalist, any reasonable journalist, not to ask that question? It’s what everyone wants to know.

MR: [still feeling very awkward] The key thing is we try to focus people away from that sort of thing and try to focus them on the fact that the game is fun no matter what platform it’s on.

GC: Do you think with the next game you make there will there be such an obvious disparity between the two formats?

MR: Unknown… But over time… If you look at Call Of Duty 2 compared to COD 4 there’s a massive graphic difference, they look very different. So I think we’ll get better, yes.

GC: But will that same proportional gap always be there?

MR: Don’t know. Until we get there I honestly don’t know. To be not diplomatic or anything [laughs] we really don’t know. We’ve done as much as we can in the time we have to get where we’re at. Will they close the gap? Will they go off in the opposite direction? Who knows? But for this game it is what it is.

GC: Do you think everyone else will have these same problems? All these other cross-generational games that are out at launch?

MR: Well, I think they’ve already said they are haven’t they? Battlefield 4 is 720 on Xbox One and I think 900 on PS4? Titanfall has said they’re 720… So we’re not the first to say we’re 720 on the Xbox One.

GC: No, no. So they’re all obviously hitting the same wall.

MR: Yeah, so you’re reading that correctly in that it’s not specifically us doing something villainous. It’s a thing where all of us have to work at getting better at developing for both consoles. And that’s the fun part. I always use the analogy that the first game on a new console is always like an awkward first date, but once you know a lot more about each other it’s a lot better.

GC: Okay that’s great, thanks very much for your time.

MR: Not at all, that was interesting.

CLICK HERE TO READ THE CALL OF DUTY: GHOSTS REVIEW

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