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It’s Infinity Ward’s turn to release a Call of Duty

Black Ops II had branching storylines; a welcome inclusion.

Captain Price - one of the series' most memorable characters.

Space, the final frontier for Call of Duty?

Seeing things from Riley's perspective was a neat touch.

Using the 'Create a Soldier' functionality in Ghosts was overly complicated.

Extinction was a stand-out in Ghosts.

Ghosts wasn’t particularly well received by fans and the fact that Infinity Ward’s latest CoD game has the ‘Infinite Warfare’ subtitle and not ‘Ghosts II’ is a telling sign that Activision is keen to distance itself from the lacklustre reception of the developer’s last Call of Duty game. While it’s a good idea to start fresh, instead of attempting to convince jaded fans that the Ghosts sub-series really could have legs, there are some key learnings Infinity Ward can take from its last divisive CoD game that could help ensure Infinite Warfare hits the ground running.One of the bigger problems for Ghosts was that it was pretty much the poster child of franchise fatigue for Call of Duty. It’s worth noting that Modern Warfare 3 was a meandering affair, co-developed with Sledgehammer Games. Modern Warfare 3 likely felt off because it was made amid the fallout of the dismissal of Infinity Ward co-founders Vince Zampella and Jason West. 46 employees (almost half of the company) resigned after Zampella and West were fired, and during the subsequent legal proceedings In saying that, Treyarch took some bigger risks with MW3 follow-up Black Ops II, most notably in the branching storylines of the campaign.Infinity Ward didn’t follow Treyarch’s lead for the next Call of Duty game, instead, opting for a campaign that felt derivative in terms of its levels and set pieces, with forgettable characters, a boring storyline, and a bombastic approach where there were too many high-energy peaks and not enough meaningful slower troughs to balance out the adrenaline-junky campaign structure.Perhaps worst of all, though, a lot of the guns felt like cookie cutter clones of others – a trend that carried over from campaign to multiplayer – which is perhaps the worst sin of all, given how important the shooting is in the franchise, let alone the FPS genre.Fast-forward to the future and Infinity Ward has the opportunity to mirror Treyarch’s approach to campaign design, mixing impactful peaks and interesting troughs so that each successive set piece isn’t competing with one that came just before, but is offering rested adrenaline levels a chance to spike after a slower section of gameplay. These troughs don’t have to be overly long, just enough to allow players the chance to catch their breath before encountering the next big set piece. And crucially, they do have to be built atop interesting characters and a compelling storyline.The other gripes can be more readily addressed by how far into the future Infinity Ward has pushed Infinite Warfare. Call of Duty borrowed more than a few things from earlier Medal of Honor games, one of the most notable features being a heavy cinematic influence. Given that both Medal of Honor and Call of Duty have all but exhausted mainstream World War II movie references, and now that CoD has touched on a lot of ‘near future’ settings, too, Infinite Warfare is free to tap into movies that deal with the distant future.This means that the likes of Star Wars, Star Trek, and Battlestar Galactica are solid references for compelling storytelling, memorable characters, and epic sci-fi set pieces. While the biggest selling points of your average CoD entry may not be storytelling and characters, Ghosts had a muddled and nonsensical campaign, with predictable twists and generic military characters. By shunning a Ghosts sequel, Infinity Ward can attempt to ground the shooting-heavy gameplay with an engaging storyline and iconic characters.The ‘distant future’ setting also frees up Infinity Ward to tackle an all-new arsenal, which hopefully isn’t so much lasers as much as it is the kind of ballistic sensibilities of the futuristic firearms of Aliens and Starship Troopers. By sticking close to ‘near future’ settings in Black Ops III and Advanced Warfare, the respective developers of each game have tried to keep the weapons as grounded as possible. On the other hand, the distant future affords an instant suspension-of-disbelief card that frees Infinity Ward to create what the hell it likes.Given that Ghosts isn’t being developed for last- and current-gen platforms, in conjunction, it also means Infinity Ward can create gameplay that’s less funnel-y and more open, not to mention a lot better looking. Ghosts was incredibly restrictive in its campaign. While it opened up a bit more towards the end, the majority of the campaign felt like a shooting gallery, with the player shifting between shootout and firefight with little emphasis on differentiation.Treyarch started the trend of shifting away from multi-generation development for Black Ops III, by ditching the campaign, and now Infinity Ward is free to take full advantage of the new-gen consoles by not artificially restricting scope and features by taking the ageing last-gen platforms into consideration. This means that, unlike Ghosts, there are greater opportunities for less-restrictive combat encounters and a bigger emphasis on player agency. It also means that low-res textures don’t have to rear their ugly heads amid some of the prettier features such as believable lighting effects.Perhaps one of the biggest disappointments of Ghosts, though, was the introduction of interesting ideas in the campaign as single-use items that didn’t become part of the core gameplay. For instance, Riley the dog was underused and a remote-controlled sniper rifle had a cool cameo appearance that could have been useful after its introduction. It’s clear Infinity Ward has some great ideas, but it’d be more meaningful to see them becoming more than fleeting features attached to specific missions, so that the player can feel a greater sense of progression as they unlock new kit and, subsequently, new gameplay mechanics that empower them with combat options.It wasn’t just the solo component of Ghosts that disappointed, either. Multiplayer was built atop a foundation of frustrating design decisions. On one hand, Infinity Ward drew a line in the sand and removed the then standard snap-to aiming on consoles, meaning skill was required to score kills, not just positioning. On the other hand, run and gunning was punished over camping or defensively roaming a fixed area.The maps were too large, horizontally and vertically, even in 18-player modes, which resulted in a lot of downtime between firefights. This means the options were to hold a position, or to run around looking for other players, except that footsteps were so loud that unmoving players had the edge on fast-moving enemies. To make matters worse, each map had a circular movement logic, usually around the fringes, which wasn’t helped by a shoddy respawn system. On top of this, killstreaks were nerfed and didn’t feel as rewarding, while kill farming was the easiest way to get to the top of the leaderboard instead of playing the objective.In terms of customisation, Squad Points were the new in-game currency that let you unlock whatever you wanted. On paper, this sounded great, but it removed that sense of round-to-round progression and also meant you weren’t incentivised to try new weapons, instead of just making a beeline to whatever the most powerful gun was at the time. It didn’t help that the ‘Create a Soldier’ feature was overly complex out of the gate, in a series that prides itself on embracing the logic of ‘easy to learn, difficult to master’. In Call of Duty, even the greenest of players should feel like they can pick up the mechanics quickly.Tight map design has long been a staple of the CoD series, and it should make a return in Infinite Warfare to ensure that people are encountering enemies around every corner. Verticality is important, but not if it comes at the expense of players chasing each other’s tails around multi-levelled maps. There’s no point punishing run-and-gun players, either, as the CoD standard low time to kill and high movement speed makes such tactics incredibly rewarding (outside of Ghosts) and keeps combat zones spread across the map, instead of concentrated around sedentary firefights.Arguably, the most important consideration is ensuring that team players are rewarded for putting the needs of their team above those kill farming to score a killstreak. The higher the killstreak requirement, the more likely a player is to camp to preserve their kills. Removing the scorestreak system that Treyarch cleverly implemented in Black Ops II was a mistake, and it should be part of Infinite Warfare.That may read like a lot of cons, but Ghosts had some good stuff going for it, too. The cooperative Extinction Mode, in particular, was a clever take on Treyarch’s Zombies formula, and infinitely better than Modern Warfare 3’s lacklustre co-op mode. The trick with Extinction, though, was that it had some great ideas that weren’t built upon, which made it feel like Left 4 Dead spliced with Killing Floor, albeit without adding anything particularly new to the mix.It’s already been announced that Zombies will be part of Infinite Warfare, but I’m hoping Infinity Ward pulls some of what it started in Extinction mode and uses that for a different take on Treyarch’s evolving Zombies formula. Multiplayer destructibility was also introduced in Ghosts, but it felt more like a watered-down attempt to match what DICE has been doing with Battlefield for years, rather than a feature that added greater depth to CoD’s multiplayer cocktail.If destructibility comes back in Infinite Warfare, it’d be great to see it used in a meaningful way, instead of something that feels like a cheap attempt to mirror what the competition is doing. Ultimately, fans of the franchise want each successive entry to move forward in terms of gameplay evolution, while retaining the features that worked in previous entries. Infinite Warfare is a distant-future fresh start for Infinity Ward, and it has the potential to restore fan faith in Infinity Ward’s Call of Duty games after the bad taste left by Ghosts.

Nathan Lawrence is a freelance writer based in Sydney and shooter specialist. Track him down on Twitter