CVG had a chance to talk to Noah Heller, the senior producer of WaW, as well as Rich Farrelly, who is the creative lead designer. They talk about the expectation of WaW and how good the Wii version will be, among other things.
You had everyone speculating over whether or not the series would return to WWII after such a successful run in a modern era with CoD 4. When do you think games will be finished with WWII?
Noah Heller: I think it will be a long time before WWII is done. The real line here is whether you can tell new stories and whether you can present something in a contemporary and new fashion.
The consumer doesn't want the same old thing, and if you deliver that, he shouldn't buy it any more than he should buy a repeat police drama or a Grand Theft Auto game set in the same genre. The challenge to us was to present something new.
Rich Farrelly: For instance, with CoD: Modern Warfare, arguably there are a lot of modern-era war games out there. But what they did is come into the market and redefined it.
That's what we want to do with the WWII genre - we want to press the Reset button, we want so say: "This is not the WWII you're used to seeing. This is something new. Yes you're firing similar weapons and yes, you've seen these locations before, but this is nothing like you've ever played."
Heller: We're not coming in to be second best. The only way we're going to make a WWII game - the only way we're going to make any game under the Call of Duty name - is if it's the best in the genre, and any genre that we enter we want to own it.
We're getting rid of the number in Call of Duty for a very specific reason. We want you to know that when you're playing CoD: WaW, you're playing the best WWII game ever. Likewise when you're playing Modern Warfare, and when you're playing any game called Call of Duty. So the bar for us isn't that this is another game in the genre, it got to be the best game of the genre. Players only have time for the best games. They only have time for the best games that show polish and passion and love from the team.
How's the Wii version coming along?
Farrelly: It is the Modern Warfare engine ported to Wii. Not some special thing - we'll be showing it soon. I think it looks better than any Wii game on the market so far. It's a special team at Treyarch focused specifically on the Wii - it's not some outsourced team, not some group living in another country. These guys live, eat and breathe Wii.
They're doing a lot of control work and developing a lot of special technology to make sure that you're able to find the enemy as quickly as possible. We'll be supporting the Zapper, which is very challenging in CoD because you've got three buttons when you're using the Zapper.
We've got a unique co-op mode and we'll support multiplayer. This is going to be easily the best shooter on Wii.
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The people you are killing were actually just regular Germans, a lot of them probably didn't even believe in Hitler's plans. They were just fighting because they were forced too, and they didn't want their country to be captured. You can't really say that every enemy soldier you shoot is evil and everyone hated them.