After hearing comments like “World at War is Call of Duty 4 with a new skin” being made around here, it’s pretty obvious that Treyarch’s latest CoD spin-off was influenced by the strong public reaction to what Infinity Ward achieved with CoD 4.
Luckily, there’s more to this story than just that. Senior producer for World at War, Noah Heller, spoke with CVG about how the importance of a solid multiplayer component is steadily growing and why single-player isn’t all developers should be focusing on.
“In the olden days of CoD you had multiplayer and you had single-player and they never meet. CoD 4 was a multiplayer sensation so it was very important that we focused on multiplayer and that we got a chance to show our own multiplayer.”
He adds that while World at War is obviously built off of Modern Warfare, Treyarch has added its own spice by including vehicles and co-op support.
Say what you will about WaW, but I think CoD 4 became immensely popular in part because of an excellent experience-based system which kept us coming back, and Treyarch was smart to avoid straying too far away from the proven formula.
If only more shooters would adopt a similar reward system …
