Call of Duty 2: Big Red One

Big Red One, the vaguely rude sounding subtitle for Activision's latest Call of Duty current gen franchise. You can also say it to make it sound like you're reading out a football result: Call of Duty 2... Big Red... One. However just because it's done by Treyarch and isn't Infinity Ward's all-singing all-dancing full-on PC and 360 sequel, don't think that Big Red One is by any means a lesser title. How do we know? Well godammit we've played the beggar, out in Poland no less and in the shadow of Hitler's wartime eastern front bunker. A dam' fine looking game it is too, being a prime example of the late flowering often seen in the latter part of a console's life cycle. Among the highlights are amazing visuals, rich and hugely varied gameplay and a battlefield so immersive, you'll swear you were marching in the footsteps of the mighty Big Red One - the US 1st Infantry division - itself. We convened a council of war and sat down with developer Treyarch's Creative Director Christian Busic, to hear about how Call of Duty 2: Big Red One, could change the face of current-gen warfare forever.

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What was your thinking behind the design of Big Red One?

Christian Busic: I wanted to do something different. It was important that we didn't just have a sequel to Finest Hour. We thought "What could we do to give the fans of the Call of Duty franchise something different?". There's a lot of WW2 shooters out there, and I think you're remiss as a developer if you don't improve over previous iterations. For me, it had always been that I wanted a more personal experience and I was definitely in the vanguard on this.

Our motto was "No-one fights alone" and it could have been interpreted in many different ways. We had an opportunity here - instead of making five SKUs of a different product, why can't we have a different slant? Someone who has a PS2 or Xbox can go out and buy Big Red One, then pick up CoD 2 on an Xbox 360 or PC and get a completely different game.

But what was your main design goal?

Christian Busic: Well we talked to the veterans and they said "That apple pie stuff is just crap. It's all about the soldier next to you." So we said, we're going to make one campaign, and we're going to follow these characters. Then the next problem was who?

The number one goal was stepping away from the original game. What does Call of Duty gain from three campaigns? We thought we had a hit because we had different environments, different enemies, different weapons. Myself and one of the design leads started going through the history books and kinda stumbled across the Big Red One [the US Infantry's first division].

He came in and said "I got it, I got it". I said "What that Sam Fuller movie?" Then I had look at their list of battles. I mean, not only were these guys everywhere, but they were famous and I didn't realise. I thought, "No-one has done this yet, we've stumbled on a gem."

So the history really fed into the game design?

Christian Busic: The BRO were the first US troops into North Africa, the first to engage enemies in World War Two, they fought Rommel and they fought with tanks and against the Vichy French. Their first mission and they were tasked to secure an airfield because it was a Vichy French air field and there were Allied planes coming in because they were low on gas and those fly boys were going into the drink if the BRO couldn't secure the airfield.

So we're like "Great, awesome". We then find out that they were in on the invasion of Sicily because Operation Torch was such a success, They're like "Okay, let's liberate Italy. That'll cut off Hitler's supply here, and open up a road into Europe." General George Patten, who helped with the design and planning of this mission, found out he was going to be in charge of American troops. The first thing he said - and this is a direct quote - was: "I want those first division sons of bitches, I'm not going in without them." That's how famous they were.

They have Sicily, and now we're thinking, we have Italy, more Italian weaponry. These guys had battle support. They were getting support from 16 inch guns, so when you're coming in on your duck, taking out mines, you see the coastline getting hammered by these guys. We're like going, check, check. Then we find out about Operation Overlord, D-Day. That was the Big Red One that was coming out of those Higgins boats. They were the first onto the beaches at Omaha beech. When you see Saving Private Ryan, that was them. Other units mistook them for Rangers, no-one expected an infantry division to be so deep into enemy territory so fast.

They thought they must be rangers or special operatives but it got to the point where one general remarked that the US Army consists of Big Red One and 10 million replacements. We had everything. We couldn't have gotten a better group to do that. They had new weaponry, new environments and were in every major battle that everybody knows about. Band of Brothers made the 101st airborne famous but the brunt of the Battle of the Bulge was shouldered by the Big Red One.

When we were talking to veterans, it got to the point where they said that after Husky, they realised that they were going to be sent into the crappiest, most shitty places, and they said, "We're not going to come back from this". I mean, it got to the point where if you survived one campaign, you were a veteran. They took horrendous casualties.

It must have been very humbling experience actually talking to the veterans who were there?

Christian Busic: My grandfather was actually a WW2 veteran, and he lived by an air force base and he used to take me down. He put me into the base library and we'd watch documentaries. On Tuesday nights it was VFW (Veterans From Wars) so he'd take me there and I'd sit there until 10 or 11 and talk to these guys. And they'd tell me these amazing stories.

So, a lot of Treyarch and Grey Matter team members have served and have grandfathers that served in WW2. So, I brought back this video tape of these guys talking and what it does is give you an absolute sense of reference. Yes, we're making an entertainment product, but we have to respect those guys. So, hopefully, when someone plays this game, they'll think "Shit, those guys did some amazing things".

The thing about WW2 that's different from any other war or police action that the US has been involved in, these were not professional soldiers. These were your neighbours. These were your bakers, mechanics, your plumbers, not professional soldiers. These were ordinary people that were called upon to do extraordinary things.

So, it was important for us that the player come away with that experience. They can watch a movie, they can read a book but Call of Duty as a franchise is positioned very nicely to be able to teach you something without you knowing it. It's a videogame that's fun. We're obviously not going to make a decision that's going to make the game un-fun.

But if it's the in the game it real. It's the same with weapons, the same with people. Big Red One gives you about as good experience as you can have about what it was like and you can come away knowing what these people had to expect, day after day. The number of days these guys spent in combat is just incredible. Big Red One is positioned well to be able to do that. It's incredible to sit there and look at a character on-screen and know a little about them. It's not just a name.

So the characters in your squad will grow and evolve over the course of the game?

Christian Busic: The game is based over a period of around three years and we drop you in the prologue mission. That takes place about two thirds of the way through the game. You can see that they're older. After that it gives you a bit of character action, talking about friends in France then boom! It's two years earlier and you're sitting on a vehicle on your way to the airfield in Iran.

Your squad are younger, you can even see the freshly pressed brown uniforms. We shot all the motion capture in chronological order, so the character will actually grow. The ones that live that is. I get a lot of heat from the team because I kill a lot of people. They ask me why they should spend so long working on art for these characters when they die. My point is like "That's what it was like. These guys don't live so long".

You'll see them progress and you'll get to know them. We do little things like this: one of the characters, Steven Kelly, he's the son of a successful doctor, a college kid who wasn't just someone from Brooklyn. He carries a notebook around. He's the reluctant soldier. Right off the bat in Iran, you hear the sergeant yelling "Private Kelly, shoot back!". He gets corrected when he's holding a rifle wrong and the Sergeant picks up on it.

Two years later, you see him talking to a replacement saying: "You hold your rifle like this. Ditch the gas mask canister, you're not going to need it." So you see this transformation from a reluctant character to some guy who's all about business, running fire across an M42. I think that's something that people will not have gotten in Call of Duty.

You mentioned earlier that you used some of the actors from Band of Brothers in the game?

Christian Busic: All the main guys except one were from Band of Brothers. When we did the motion capture, instead of one guy doing the same action five times in a scene and a voice actor read his lines, we hired individual actors to do the voice acting and the motion capture for each character. Frank John Hughes is Brooklyn. What that gives us is an actor who brings quality acting to the role. Franklin John Hughes sticks out his gut when he walks. That comes across in the motion capture.

The cool thing about the Band of Brothers actors, apart from them being absolutely stoked for doing this, was that before filming Band Of Brothers, they had to go and do ten week's boot camp. They had to go through what a soldier goes through. Now, they call it actors' boot camp, because they don't want to disrespect the people that served.

But, how many actors can do that? So we got them as actors, but we also got mini military advisors because they then spent 10 months in England shooting Band of Brothers. I mean, when they shot the winter scenes, the producers took them a mile away from the set, made them suit up and march through the snow to the set, so when they got there, they were tired and pissed off. So these guys brought that extra realism to the set. If I'd hired soldiers, I would have got great action, but I don't think I would've got great acting. They have the expertise. They know how to reload their weapons, they knew how to stand. All that adds authentic realism.

One of the things that strikes you about BRO, is that it's a very immersive and indeed massively loud combat environment - did you up the stakes for realism?

Christian Busic: With Big Red One, we're asking for a very personal experience. If you have a quiet battlefield, it kind of takes away from that. In World War Two, American soldiers had very few tactics at the beginning. All they had was suppress and flank, like a one trick pony. They had to learn everything from day one.

So we have the AI to a limited extent, aware of the environment. They know when a German is behind a wall, so they'll tell you or if they're low on bullets they'll shout: "I need ammo". Hank [BRO's military adviser] was instrumental in that. The added bonus in Big Red One is that the characters even know each other's names. If Kelly is out of ammo, and Vic in the in vicinity, he'll say "Vic, I need some ammo". It's the same with cover as well.

That even further enhances the fact that it's not just you and a bunch of random names. They're people and you have a battlefield where you have all sorts of guys shouting at each other. There'll be all sorts of people shouting and you can't quite hear what people are saying. My dev team have asked "don't you want that a little louder?". I say: "No, he's way over there and there're mortars going off". That's what it was like. Besides actors only have a certain amount in their voices in each day, so we spread out our voice action and motion capture.

One thing that's very impressive is BRO's engine and game tech. How you've managed to make it look so good on current-gen? How do you get such graphical horsepower out of the PS2?

Christian Busic: That's a question every journalist's asked me and it's a testament to how good it looks. It's usually preceded by: "Don't you wish you were doing it for the Xbox 360?" I have complete respect for the guys, the fact that they can make it look like it's the Xbox 360 is great but the answer to the question is "no".

Yes I would like to make a game for the Xbox 360 next year, but our game looks so good because the twilight of the hardware cycle is always the best because we know how to wrangle every bit of power out of these machines. In our debug we have these performance meters, so we know the designers can watch what the GPU and CPU are doing. The command was "Push it past the limit and then peg it back".

We'd have never been able to make a game look as good on the PS2 two years ago. Treyarch brings with it an engine that took years in the making. It even owes some stuff back to the days of Dreamcast. The PS2 is a very difficult box to tame, it's very powerful, but you really have to know how to balance it. It's not a plug in and play development system.

The neat thing about Big Red One is that it's all about the same experience. We're not going to give you an extra level because you have an Xbox. If you've got an Xbox, PS2 or GameCube it'll be the same experience on all systems. It's challenging because they're not all the same level of hardware.

Although the Xbox will have 480p as well as true 5.1 Dolby digital. The Pro Logic 2 on the PS2 is frickin' amazing though, I'd love to do another current generation title, because there's still legs in it. I mean, you've seen what it looks like on the PS2. We might even be able to wring a little more out of it. You never know.

Tell us a touch more about multiplayer?

Christian Busic: The multiplayer was born out of conversations with the team but I didn't want it to be something that was simply tacked onto the single player game. Call of Duty wasn't a really good multiplayer experience on console before, but now I hope it is. Both PS2 and Xbox support 16 players all with vehicles, so you can hop into a tank and blast someone as he hops backwards. We have Deathmatch, Team Deathmatch, Capture the Flag, Domination and Search and Destroy, so there's plenty of variety. It will be both real fun and real deadly!

John Houlihan