From my limited experience, that's always something the CoD teams have done incredibly well: maintain focus on suspension of player disbelief as their core KPI.
Technologies or tricks that enhance it are used. Technical masturbation that's ancillary is eschewed.
In the first CoD game, the illusion shattered instantly when you deviated from the expected path (e.g. linger in an area, backtrack, or take an odd turn).
But that was part of the focus and prioritization of effort... they could have improved that, at the expense of making the main path less stellar. They didn't.
I've gotta admire the focus and feature discipline.
Edit: One of the core things that strikes me from the video (not having seen generations of intervening games) is how far human animation libraries and mocap has come. At some point, they've climbed enough of the opposite wall of the uncanny valley not to have it be obviously wrong. Glad we finally got there.
And other side note, everyone should remember this is a multiplatform release. They don't have the luxury of spec'ing to the latest and greatest hardware from Nvidia and AMD. This has to run on consoles with decent performance and with a minimum of per-platform code rework and optimization.
> maintain focus on suspension of player disbelief
Something that really struck me when I when I first played Half-Life 2 was how much it all felt like a movie set, where everything was designed to look fantastic along this one narrow path that you're quickly ushered along, but there was absolutely nothing beyond that path. It's all just lovingly detailed facades.
That's the story with all linear AAA games. I think for most players the illusion works great, but I can't help but see the artifice.
> That's the story with all linear AAA games. I think for most players the illusion works great, but I can't help but see the artifice.
It's okay, since this a stylized classic HN insight porn comment.
Calling it an "illusion" is a really dumb take. It reminds me that hardly anyone in this forum reads fiction, and even if you created Ready Player One for them, they'd do exactly what the game designers gave them to do.
Anyway, Call of Duty games have a great variety of levels. "Defend Burger Town" comes to mind as a Modern Warfare 2 (2009) level you could explore pretty freely.
Half Life 2 had open set pieces. Uncharted 4 has possibly the best chase sequence in gaming. It would be so stupid and reductionist to call that an "illusion," just because they have some paths for your car to take.
What do you want? Even the real world expects you to walk and drive along paths. That's just architecture dude. It exists just as often in "open world games" like Red Dead Redemption as it does in "sequence of setpieces" games like Call of Duty.
Technologies or tricks that enhance it are used. Technical masturbation that's ancillary is eschewed.
In the first CoD game, the illusion shattered instantly when you deviated from the expected path (e.g. linger in an area, backtrack, or take an odd turn).
But that was part of the focus and prioritization of effort... they could have improved that, at the expense of making the main path less stellar. They didn't.
I've gotta admire the focus and feature discipline.
Edit: One of the core things that strikes me from the video (not having seen generations of intervening games) is how far human animation libraries and mocap has come. At some point, they've climbed enough of the opposite wall of the uncanny valley not to have it be obviously wrong. Glad we finally got there.
And other side note, everyone should remember this is a multiplatform release. They don't have the luxury of spec'ing to the latest and greatest hardware from Nvidia and AMD. This has to run on consoles with decent performance and with a minimum of per-platform code rework and optimization.