out closer to home is harder to gloss
over. Even in a more familiar location –
a generic and fictional Middle Eastern
country – it’s not as easy to digest as
it used to be, with Russian attacks
on villages again mirroring more
recent events. Innocents are shot and
gassed in the street as you take the
role of a young girl trying to escape,
the background story unfolding
around you as people die. Its only
fumble is that once cornered by a
Russian soldier and forced to fight,
the sneaking, stabbing boss battle
feels almost too videogame-y against
the otherwise unflinching attempt to
portray a modern face of war.
One area where this looks to be
unashamedly referencing the original
game, however, is the multiplayer.
While only the new Gunfight mode has
been shown off, its 2v2 deathmatches
are a reminder of when skill beats
killstreaks. With each team using
identical weapons equipped at
random in tiny maps, it’s a return to
the less gadget-reliant pace of recent
COD games. Combined with the more
realistic campaign, it’s a refreshing
indication of what’s to come. Q
More Xbox news at gamesradar.com/oxm THE OFFICIAL XBOX MAGAZINE 051Campaign gameplay director
Jacob Minkoff and studio
narrative director Taylor
Kurosaki explain how Modern
Warfare’s amazing Townhouse
level came aboutON THE
TOWNέ^ OFFI
CIAL
XBOX^ MAGAZINE
έABOVE This Price
is not too
different from
the Price you
remember.
LEFT The gritty
conflict will
take you across
the globe.
BELOW Modern
events have
clearly inspired
the game.Jacob Minkoff: 12 years later
we’ve all stolen everything
from the Modern Warfare series
dozens of times. When we
started making this game we said
the dial is pegged at 11, we can’t
break it off and go to 15. All we
can do is strip it back, go down,
make it more grounded.Taylor Kurosaki: How do you make
climbing a set of stairs, hearing
the audio of the floor above you,
and make that be as intense as
nukes going off?JM: The very first thing I did
on this game was lay out that
townhouse. And that was
specifically an attempt to push
us and say, ‘Can we make a Call
Of Duty game where there are
ten people in the house and six
of them are a threat?’ And it’s
all about threat acquisition. You
know Price is always yelling at
you in the old games like ‘check
those corners’ and you never
have to check the corners. You
just jump out take a bunch of
bullets, shoot a bunch of dudes
and then your red jelly goes away
and you’re fine. So we make it
more intimate, more cinematic...TK: ...more lethal!JM: Absolutely. We talked about
increased lethality a lot. If you
just run around and you don’t
play the corners you will die from
a single bullet if you’re too close
to an enemy in that townhouse.