Dev defends ageing Call of Duty engine

Modern Warfare 3 co-developer Sledgehammer Games has stepped up to defend the Call of Duty game engine against allegations that it's starting to show its age.

Studio general manager Glen Schofield - who created Dead Space for EA before setting up Sledgehammer - told CVG that it's one of the slickest he's ever worked on

"I've worked on a lot of engines over my lifetime and spent a lot of time putting graphics in to them and this thing is Porsche," he claimed.

"And what I mean by that is that it is stream-lined, everything in it is perfectly freaking clean. You can tell it's been worked on for years. It's easy to upgrade.

"We worked with engines before that are like f****** spaghetti. You can't work on a part and put it back in without messing with everything else. Modern Warfare 3's levels now are so much bigger than the old ones because they go more vertically, they have a bigger footprint and on top of that, higher fidelity, more textures and a lot more detail."

Schofield insisted that the engine is continually upgraded, as should be obvious when Modern Warfare 3 ships next month. Critics who say otherwise, he argued, don't know what they're talking about.

"Look at all the character models, look at all the gun models, look at the reflections, look at the water. There is so much that we've added, so when someone says 'cut and paste', I don't even want to talk to them because they don't know. They just don't know. They have no idea."

He added that regularly iterating on the engine has improved the quality of the gameplay.

"People don't think about this but when you make your tools better and you can iterate twice as many times, you make the game better. So instead of going, 'Well, I'd really like to move that guy over an inch, that would actually make it better.' And people going, 'Ah, that's a pain in the arse. I'm not going to move him'.

"Imagine multiplying that over 200 times, 300 times, a 1000 times over the course of the game. By not moving something, you're really affecting quality. With the tools we've added, maybe we can move them. The more you can iterate, the better the game will be.

"I've said this before - I'm not shipping an engine, I'm shipping a game," he concluded. "So that's why I'm going to talk about the game. You can talk about your engine all you want. It's not fun."

See for yourself when the game launches on 8th November.