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The surf is pink, or maybe magenta. A few dead boys float on the waves, in and out, like a melody. I wonder at the cost of all their gear, their training and their getting here, from Kansas and California and Connecticut, all so they could jump out of a transport, take a slug and float with the stillness of starfish.

The Reich’s bullets make pretty little pings on the surface of the sea. My character is not one of those who is slain before touching France. That would make for a very poor game. He’s protected by the privilege of being my avatar.

“A lot of us are the grandchildren of World War II’s fighters”

He gasps, scrambles through the chaos, runs cringing up the beach before crouching beside one of those iron D-Day cover points called hedgehogs. But safety is relative here. He shares the hedgehog with a dead soldier, half his face missing.

These are the first few moments of a Call of Duty: WWII demo I watched in Sledgehammer Games’ viewing room last week. The game is out on Nov. 3.

To say that these storming-the-beaches moments are iconic representations of World War II is to fall short of their power, even 70-odd years on. Utah, Omaha, Gold, Sword and Juno were just codenames for beaches on June 6, 1944. But they are now hallowed echoes of sacrifice, bravery and a noble assault on actual evil. If D-Day makes you feel nothing, you’re doing it wrong.

This is why Call of Duty: WWII is more than just another in Activision’s rollout of annual shooting games. In recent years, the company has focused on science fiction-tinged games featuring tougher-than-life heroes, all beef and bravado. Those games are fun, but they are separated from the world we live in because nothing they portray ever really happened. D-Day happened.

“I think it’s time, it just feels like it’s time”

Call of Duty was originally a series about World War II, but moved on when tastes changed, when the setting was so thoroughly overplayed that there was nothing left to say. But a new generation of consoles is here, a new generation of players. It seems like a strong time to go back.

The commercial and critical success of Electronic Arts’ World War I game, Battlefield 1, is a positive sign that real-world conflicts can still hold their own against the free-for-all of science fiction or enhanced modern-day reality.

There’s a problem and an opportunity associated with the real world, though, and most especially with World War II. We, as a society, worship the people who fought that war. They’re not called the Greatest Generation for nothing.

And so, World War II, especially the last year of the war, is probably the most intensely examined few years in historical fiction. Wikipedia lists more than 90 films made, set during World War II, since 2010. That’s getting one for one every month. The full list, from 1939 to the present day, is too long to count. But we’ve all got our favorite. (For me, it’s Ice Cold in Alex.)

Sledgehammer’s demo day is one of those carefully managed media events during which a tiny bit of gameplay is shown, and a lot of talking points are covered. I haven’t played this game. All I’ve seen of it are carefully selected snippets. All I’ve heard of it are pitch speeches from its makers.

Still, I’m more interested in this game than I’ve been for a Call of Duty release in many years. Sledgehammer did a good job with Advanced Warfare. The company’s leaders have a solid track record that includes Dead Space.

But can they deliver a fun game that has something interesting to say about a war that’s been covered over and over again in popular culture, including video games?

Respect and realism

Glen Schofield’s grandfather fought in the Italian campaign in World War II. He was injured while taking out a machine gun nest that had pinned his unit down. His injuries resulted in the loss of his leg. After the war, he became a salesman.

Schofield is a co-founder of Sledgehammer. Sitting in the company meeting room, he tells me why he feels now is the right time to take Call of Duty back to the Second World War.

“A lot of us are the grandchildren of World War 2’s fighters. I am, so for me it’s been a nice trip to be able to talk about this, to research it more and really understand the war that my grandfather went through.”

His grandfather passed some years ago, and Schofield notes that the generation that defeated Nazism is almost gone.

My own grandmother, now 95 years old, was a young woman in World War II. Her father was killed during the Blitz. She had to identify his body. My grandfather, who died 20 years ago, fought alongside Montgomery in North Africa. He won a medal for driving a badly needed petrol tanker through a blazing depot, but he never once spoke to me about it. You likely have stories like this. (Please feel free to share them in the comments.)

Schofield also notes that there’s a new generation that is just learning about the war. Movies like Inglourious Basterds and Dunkirk offer specific entry points into the conflict. But the most famous of modern D-Day pictures was made a long time ago. “It’s been almost 20 years since Saving Private Ryan,” he says. “I think it’s time; it just feels like it’s time."

Having watched Call of Duty: WWII’s D-Day landing sequence, I ask what this game has to say that Saving Private Ryan and all the WWII video games of the past haven’t said.

“Private Ryan is a bit distant from the action,” Schofield says. “I’m seeing it from side view. I’m seeing it from different views. I’m not always seeing it from another human. What we wanted to do was make it more personal.

“Our thought was to put you in the middle. You’re the one holding the gun; we see your hand, we hear you breathing, you’re using the Bangalore [torpedo]. You’re the one watching your friends die all around you. It’s a much more profound experience than the earlier Call of Duty games, of course, because of the more advanced hardware that we’re using.”

Story and characters

Call of Duty: WWII’s story is told from the point of view of Ronald “Red” Daniels, a rookie Private in the United States Army, 1st Infantry Division, also known as the “Fighting First.” Initially, he relies heavily on his superiors Pierson and Turner, who both have different ideas about how to conduct themselves in combat.

“Pierson and Turner have served together for years, so there’s a real bond between the two men,” says narrative director Scott Whitney. “At the same time, they each embody a very different worldview, with Turner embracing a man before the mission philosophy, while Pierson is all about the mission before the man. Over the course of our story we see how these two philosophies come into conflict and how Daniels, caught in the middle, learns to navigate a path for himself.”

“You have to worry about every bullet”

Other characters appear, including female resistance fighters, a soldier in an African-American unit (the U.S. Army was still segregated in WWII), a British officer and even a child.

Daniels has no super abilities. He’s just a regular kid in an extremely frightening situation. Flashbacks tell us about his upbringing in Texas, where he learns certain lessons about honor and bravery from his father — lessons he must reconsider once he experiences the horrors of real action.

The game begins just before D-Day, presumably some sort of training tutorial in England. It follows the Allies as they fight their way out of Normandy, all the way to Germany.

Red and his comrades do not wear body armor. Their training has been perfunctory and brief. This plays out in how they fight. They are scared and they are unskilled.

Animation director Chris Stone explains that in modern shooting games, the player stance is often designed to be fully faced to the enemy, in order to maintain stability. Body armor offers the necessary protection. Not so in the old days. “In World War II, soldiers faced the enemy side-on, in order to diminish themselves as a target. They were extremely vulnerable. This made them less stable and less accurate,” he says.

"The light in France is so different than here”

Schofield won’t talk about the health system yet, but auto-restoration is not happening. Reading between the lines, I gather that med-packs are the likely solution, perhaps even called for from medics, rather than just sitting around.

“You have to worry about every bullet,” says Schofield. “You’re not the superhero. You can’t just stand there taking seven bullets, ducking, shooting again. It’s refreshing for us to deal with recruits who aren’t Tier One warriors, to show that vulnerability. They’re naïve. It’s been a really cool challenge creating this different kind of gameplay.”

Light and sound

Weapon gunfire sounds were all recorded during visits to historical armories and museums, according to audio director Dave Swenson. In his soundproof office, he tells me stories about recording planes and tanks, placing microphones at various distances from the weapons to get the right variations in sound, taking them out to the woods to gain the right echo.

I watch a section of the game set during the Battle of Hürtgen Forest. Red runs through a thicket of trees while artillery pounds the ground around him. He has a sniper rifle that he uses to pick off Germans. But all the while, the trees around him are exploding. There’s an awful din of guns, shouting and cracking wood.

“We went out into the woods to record me breaking branches and splitting wood trunks,” recalls Swenson. “We also did some shouts and screams, to get the right sound in the forest. Some hikers came by and we probably freaked them out,” he laughs.

“Some hikers came by and we probably freaked them out”

I was impressed, watching the D-Day demo, that they had the weather right. There’s a sense of the storm that had just passed, delaying and hampering the invasion — the thinness of an English Channel dawn in spring.

Light is also important to the overall sense of time and place. Art director Joe Salud shows me a ton of photographs he took during a trip to Normandy, especially of the sky. “Light is very important to me,” he says. "The light in France is so different than here [in Northern California]. It sets a tone for the different locations where the game takes place.”

Telling the story of Red’s progression through the war is also aided by props. Stone’s desk is covered in models and artifacts from the 1940s. He tells me about a sequence from the game in which Red enters a house, seeking to flush out the enemy.

It’s an old woman’s house, with knickknacks and pictures of a husband killed in the last war. But there’s also evidence that the house is quartering German soldiers. “The home of an elderly relative is something that’s familiar to most of us,” he says. “When you see a soldier in this place, you know that something is wrong. It makes you feel something.”

Multiplayer

I watch a section of the game that takes place in the German bunkers above the D-Day landing beaches. It’s pretty standard FPS fare (in shooting games, realism only goes so far). Red guns down lots of men as he makes his way through the network of tunnels and rooms.

There’s also a nasty melee knife fight with a vicious-looking German as well as secondary devices such as grenades and smoke bombs. The guns I saw included a standard rifle, sniper rifle, submachine gun and pistol. They are all true to the time and place.

“You know that something is wrong. It makes you feel something”

“We’re focused on making this game feel better, more special and newer than all that’s gone before,” says Schofield. “We make the gun feel better, make it feel heavier. When I go hard into a ditch in a tank, I see the dust inside the tank. It makes me feel like I’m there. Nobody will think about the exoskeletons again.”

Although Red is your primary character in the game, you do play as other fighters. Sledgehammer is pretty vague on this aspect of the story at this point, but there are sections in which vehicles are used, and this is likely the trigger for stepping into other people’s shoes.

We know the narrative campaign does not require that the player takes on the role of any Germans. There’s also a co-op campaign, though no details have been released as yet. Necessarily, playing on the German side does happen in the multiplayer game, always a mainstay of Call of Duty.

“We’re bringing it back to boots on the ground,” says Schofield, brandishing a marketing line that’s likely to be oft-repeated. He adds that there’ll be hands-on multiplayer opportunities at E3. In the meantime, he outlines the shape of competitive play.

In Divisions, the player creates a class and progresses through the ranks. This affords an option to choose the kind of division you want to join, whether that be infantry, airborne or armored. Players are also given a range of options in terms of the part they play, including women resistance fighters, Brits, African-American GIs and others to be announced.

War is the name given to objective-based team contests between Axis and Allies forces that are all about taking ground, so there will be missions that task one side with defense and the other with attack.

I ask if the actual D-Day landings are one of the battle scenarios. “It’s an asymmetrical fight over objectives, sort of linear,” says Schofield, somewhat cryptically. “We haven’t announced what experiences we’re delivering yet. At one point you will be playing as the attacking and the defensive Axis team.”

Headquarters is a “social space” for players to hang out between matches, to “be rewarded and have fun,” according to Schofield.

"We have a great historic conflict of good versus evil”

There’s not much information on multiplayer, so we get to talking about the problem of having players take on the role of Nazis, who are, after all, history’s most appalling villains.

Obviously, not all German soldiers were genocidal Nazis, but the uniform they wore and the fight they fought represent the Nazis’ atrocities, even if the historical subtleties between the Wehrmacht and SS are hazy to most of us.

“The big distinction that Germans still make today is that between the German military and the Nazis,” says Schofield. “We made sure we made that distinction in the game, that the Germans were doing their duty ...”

“We have a great historic conflict of good versus evil,” says fellow co-founder Michael Condrey. “But to make factions work you have to play as the Axis. In no way are we going to glorify that position, but we also can’t shy away from it.”

Atrocities and sensitivities

Everybody I hear from at Sledgehammer talks about taking care over the historical accuracy of World War II, and respecting what that conflict means to us today. As the game spans the full advance from Normandy into Germany, I have to ask if it takes the Nazi death camps as any of its settings.

I don’t get a straight answer, but I don’t get a denial, either.

“We want to tell the whole story”

“This global conflict was rooted in some true atrocities,” says Condrey. “The story is anchored in some iconic moments in the war. The D-Day invasion in Normandy was one of those. There are also other things that make the war so powerful. The historical context of the atrocities of World War II is something that we want to tell the players.”

I press for specifics.

“We’re storytellers,” adds Condrey. “Part of that narrative is having fans really be able to experience that for themselves. We don’t want to get into mass graves or things like that. I don’t want to get into the full narrative arc, but suffice it to say there is a flux in human history because of the power of those atrocities committed and we want to tell the whole story.”

We’ll have more on Call of Duty: WWII in the weeks and months ahead. In the meantime, here’s an interview with Activision CEO Eric Hirshberg about the Call of Duty franchise.