For Glen Schofield, war is personal. The co-founder of Sledgehammer Games and game director for the upcoming Call Of Duty: WW2, comes from a family steeped in the military. “My father would tell me stories of my grandfather being in World War II, of him fighting,” he tells GQ. “And then my dad was in the military for Vietnam. He died during the making of this game, so we named the main character after him – Red – because my grandfather had given him that nickname during the war.”

Call Of Duty isn’t a franchise known for its delicate sensibilities, but with COD: WW2 that has changed dramatically to focus more on story and the characters therein. It’s a change of direction that was sorely needed after the series had strayed further and further into sci-fi absurdity – a decision that caused it to lose its narrative punch.

“You won’t play as a German in the single player,” Schofield explains after we watch the game’s first story trailer, “but you do play as other Allies. You play as a female French resistance soldier, as an RAF pilot, and as a tank commander. But it all comes back to Ronald “Red” Daniels. He’s a kid from Texas and it’s a story about him and his brother. They basically walk through France, with 60lbs on their back, a 10lb weapon and lousy equipment. You’ll liberate Paris, but then it goes to hell again. We show the euphoria and then the letdown.”

Make no mistake, Schofield assures us, this is absolutely still an action romp with an explosive thrust, but it’s pitched differently to encapsulate the sense of dread that hung over the era. “If you think about a city like Aachen, which was 80 percent destroyed,” he says, “we put you in the middle of that with a tank. We made technology just for that level so we could destroy all the buildings. It’s a different kind of spectacle.”

To bolster the historical accuracy of this huge new undertaking, Sledgehammer enlisted the services of Marty Morgan, an expert historian who specialises in the World Wars. Want to know which insignia goes where on a soldier’s uniform, during a specific period of the conflict? Unsure what guns should and shouldn’t be on the Western Front? He's your man.

“Sometimes having this knowledge can be painful," says Morgan. "I watched *Saving Private Ryan *create mythologies that didn’t exist. There’s a sniper character in it and he’s using the wrong rifle and it’s got the wrong scope. It’s a rifle only used by the United States Marine Corps, and was never used in Europe at any point. The story goes that, on set when they put the correct firearm in the hand of the actor, Spielberg was like, ‘What the hell’s that, that doesn’t look like a sniper scope at all’. So they went with the more cinematic sniper scope. It created this mythology that continues to linger 20 years later.”

No such compromises in this game, though it does have a Hollywood patina. “What I’ve found is that there’s an underlying quality bar that you have to hit,” says Schofield. “We came over to work on Call Of Duty and it was there I realised I’ve gotta raise my bar even higher. Because there’s 25 million people playing this game.” As an example, he points to a moment within Call of Duty: WW2 featuring a military train that, of course, ends up crumpled. “I’d call Marty up and say, ‘I need a train. I need a very important train. Around the April of 1944.’ He came back with four different ones, we narrowed it down to two, and the final one was more interesting than what I was coming up with myself.” The result is what Schofield describes as one of the series’ biggest set-piece moments ever: “The crash of our train is major.”

By far the team’s biggest challenge was no longer having access to the game mechanics afforded by the futuristic settings of recent CoD games. Features like the boost jump and wall run, which allowed far greater environmental dynamism, obviously can’t exist in the Forties setting. “When we first started we were like, ‘Oh shit, there’s not that many weapons’,” Schofield continues. “Then Marty started showing us everything and we realised pretty quickly that the issue of variety was not going to be the problem. It was going to be, ‘Can we make up for the lack of a boost jump in different ways?’

“That’s when we went heavier on story. Just by reading what happened in World War II the action just comes out to you, it’s already there. In World War II they had 2000lb bombs and the buildings were from the 14th century, so when they blew up they… just… exploded. Or they’d drop 50 bombs just to get one house. Things were pretty big back then.”

Morgan has clearly had a huge impact on the creative process at Sledgehammer. “We did a trip with Marty where we went from Luxembourg all the way through France, Belgium and into Germany,” Schofield says. “We went in the middle of winter; we were in three or four feet of snow, blizzard conditions, and there’s still foxholes out there. We were so far away from civilisation and there’s still foxholes and trenches along the sides of the road. We saw carvings in the trees. I remember we’re in the middle of nowhere and there’s a giant 60 ton King Tiger tank just left because they couldn’t move the damn thing. It’s gigantic.”

The studio may be slightly behind the curve after last year’s Great War-era Battlefield 1, but Sledgehammer is hitting the right notes in terms of diversifying the formula and toeing a delicate line between historical accuracy and Hollywood entertainment.

“We’ve done stuff differently on this game,” concludes Schofield, explaining how much further his team has gone into writing plot. “At the beginning you’re going to see a movie for a couple of minutes – you’re going to see a couple more throughout. It’s still a shooter, but you’ll see a lot of personality and a lot of different people. We don’t shy away from some of the big things. There was racism, sexism, and all the brutalities. If it’s part of the story we tell it. But at the same time, we do make a distinction between Nazis and Germans. One of the first things we did was talk to people from Germany and people said to us, ‘I’m a German not a Nazi’. We make sure we have that distinction in there as well – the human side of both sides.”

Call Of Duty: WW2 is out on 3 November for PS4, Xbox One and PC

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