The “Break it Down” Blog

For those of you, like me, that saw the announcement that Call of Duty 5 was around the corner and was blown away to see a trailer this fast, and shit a brick… reel it back in a bit. Call of Duty 5 is being done by a 3rd party studio (Treyarch - The guys that made Call of Duty Suck 3) and not by the Infinity Ward guys (the ones that took 3.5 years to make the epic success Call of Duty 4).

This is the result of Activision owning the rights to the Call of Duty franchise and not wanting to wait 3 years for a block-buster hit followup. So they cash in on the name and outsource the development of another game in the chain to a 3rd party studio to get it done faster. This sucked balls for Call of Duty 3 but the trailer for Call of Duty 5, set back in World War 2, actually looks pretty decent.

Check out the trailer:

The one thing I noticed in the trailer was a complete lack of reactions from the environment to what was going on (grenades, fire, gunshots, etc); it’s also using the Call of Duty 4 engine, so I wouldn’t expect much different.

This is something I can’t goddamn stand about the Call of Duty entire series is the complete lack of a physical environments. There is a theme with this franchise where super-realistic, ultra-scripted environments are created and as long as you play through like you are on rails, you will be blown away, but if you relax for a bit and try and dick around, you’ll notice immediately how static the levels are… makes you feel like you are back in Counter Strike 1.

This is one reason I’m looking really closely at Brothers in Arm: Hell’s Highway, it looks like really physical environments that IMO make the battle scenes way more intense and realistic.

So for the folks that can’t get enough of Call of Duty, regardless of who does it, stick this on your radar. For the folks that hated #3, you might want to hold out for reviews of this one, no date has been given yet.