After last year’s Call of Duty: World at War from Treyarch, developer Infinity Ward returns to the helm for this year’s Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2. Activision has incredibly high hopes for the new game, saying it wants Modern Warfare 2 to be the most successful launch ever.
It’s a challenge an no mistake, because the original Modern Warfare managed to sell 12 million copies, and what’s more Activision has raised the price for Modern Warfare 2 to a “premium”. So Modern Warfare 2 has to now sell more copies at a higher price.
Gamers shouldn’t consider this bad news necessarily though, because it shows that Activision thinks that Modern Warfare 2 is good enough to warrant it. In terms of what’s on offer to gamers, it’s the usual combination of single player and multiplayer, with the latter being often cited as the reason behind the original’s success.
Multiplayer footage released by Infinity Ward has shown the new chain bonus, and provided evidence as to the quality of the new graphics in Modern Warfare 2. Everything looks more polished, although there remain some doubters about quality.
While it’s known that Modern Warfare 2 will only run at 1024×600 (not HD) as the original did, it’s also possible to say that Infinity Ward has done a lot of work on improving the graphics. Animations are noticeably smoother, environments are more open to destruction and there are more details on show everywhere.
Little is still known about the Single Player in Modern Warfare 2, although it has been confirmed that missions will take gamers from the deserts of Afghanistan to the snow mountains of Russia and that there will be an extended variety of gameplay in the missions.
Like every other aspect of Modern Warfare 2, it looks like Infinity Ward has chosen to take the successful elements from the original and just amp them up. More of the same but better, which makes it very much a sequel, and this case familiarity is likely to breed success.
Modern Warfare 2 is due out 10th November 2009 on Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and PC.