INhonolulu Magazine Issue #14 - February 2014 | Page 32

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Ghosts of technology past
Trent Robertson

T

he Call of Duty (COD)
games had a winning
formula: epic scale battles with the player acting as a
small part of a larger army to
achieve military objectives, cinematic storytelling, orchestrated soundtracks and a chaotic,
adrenaline-fueled
multiplayer
mode.
The most critical part of the
game’s initial success was not so
much its creative direction, but
rather the game engine the developers chose as a foundation.
The first COD game was rePage 32

leased in 2003 by Infinity Ward
(IW). The game was developed
using id Tech 3, which was a
commercialized engine developed by the makers of Doom and
Quake.
With each new iteration of
COD, the game engine was
tweaked to add new effects, such
as realistic lighting and post-processing. At its core, however, was
still a game engine that originally was developed for id’s Quake
III Arena, released back in 1999.
As gaming technology progressed, less and less emphasis

was placed on polygon count and
texture resolution. Shader effects
took prominence, since they resulted in much more immersive
environments with high, dynamic range lighting, tessellated geometry, gaussian motion blur,
etc.
In order to use these new effects, game developers had to
either build new engines that
incorporated the technology, or
buy a license for technology that
already included it.
id Tech 3 was not built for these
new advancements in graphical processing, so Infinity Ward
hacked and modified it to simulate these new effects. There was,
however, a limit to how much
power they could squeeze out of
a quickly aging game engine.
Every game in the series prom-

ised a 60Hz frame rate while
maintaining cinematic quality
visuals, but a new generation of
consoles changed the developers’
perspective. IW knew they had
to step up their game to match
the capabilities of the new systems, so they boosted the visuals
in COD: Ghosts the only way they
knew how: push that old game
engine even harder.
Polygon counts were pushed
to the limit. Texture resolutions
were sharp beyond the distinction of the human eye. It was an
unoptimized mess that neglected
the advancements made in other game engines such as Crytek’s
CryEngine or Battlefield’s Frostbite, both of which rely on tessellation and global illumination
to achieve a higher fidelity than
what’s found in Ghosts.

If IW had chosen to