Call of Duty: World at War Interview

Our annual chat with the people behind the newest candidate for Game of the Year material - join us as we quiz Activision's Noah Heller.

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Kikizo: Cool. So the big new addition is co-op. The revival thing seems like an interesting dynamic, in that if you all need to be revived at the same time, you've basically failed. Did you consider including self revival? I mean, if it was an every man for himself environment, you would respawn eventually, but here it's punishing.

Heller: We looked at that a little bit. But at its essence, Call of Duty is about teamwork. And it's one of the reasons why we loved the competitive mode, where you earn points for kills and you can get kill streaks. Even though it's competitive, it's co-operative! You know, we actually call the mode 'Competitive Co-operative', which sounds like an oxymoron, but if you want to take the risk of going ahead of your team, and getting the most points possible by getting ahead on kills, you have to take that risk that you're going to go down and need revival. And for your team to extract and revive you, they may have to crawl on their belly, take great risk to themselves... they might not want to play with you again if you play like an idiot! I'm looking forward to players who play in co-operative mode, four players on veteran - and we do scale up difficulty based on the number of humans in the match - four players on veteran, is a pretty hard game, I'm looking forward to those players working as a team, and I'm really looking forward to competitive players walking the line between 'how can they piss off their co-op friends', and at the same time, 'how can they earn the most amount of points possible'.

Kikizo: So when it is team based play, how did you address the balance of rewarding you as a team, and punishing you as a team? How do you avoid that becoming frustrating, if there is one sort of 'bad egg' on the team?

Heller: Well you know, it's a little bit of a self-correcting problem, because the host will probably kick that guy out of the session if he's really a bad egg. From a points perspective, if you're really playing competitively, you want nothing more than someone who keeps killing themselves; you can eliminate all the enemies, get the points, and then revive him, which counts towards your point value, and then let him get up and do it again! You're going to be up in the Leaderboards in no time! So it's one of those problems that kind of fixes itself; it's not like a multiplayer session where someone can just be a jerk, for the sake of being a jerk. If you're a jerk in co-op, you've got no reason to be there, and the host will kick you out in two seconds, because it's obvious you're being a jerk!

Kikizo: One of the other big deals for co-op in gaming this year is going to be Left 4 Dead. I think the backbone of the project started out as AI. One of the areas the AI is used in their game is dynamic difficulty; if one of you dies turn the heat down a bit, but if you're all performing really well, turn it up. Do you have something similar in here?

Heller: We do have dynamic difficulty, except we don't make it easier. We make it harder, the more people you add, and we try and do it the old fashioned way, we add more AI. When you're playing four players co-op, there's a lot of active AI trying to kill you. Yeah they might be a little tougher in tougher difficulty modes, but we don't want to do anything that's ridiculous, like 'the person takes multiple headshots to die' or anything crazy like that. But the advantage of spawning in more enemies, is the enemies will have a chance of spawning in with heavier weaponry as well, so all of a sudden, this battle that might have been six or seven soldiers armed with bolt action rifles, is now fifteen or sixteen, and half of which have sub machineguns, and that cab be a very challenging thing. We've also added in something called Death Cards - you're going to find them spread throughout the levels, and when you get one, you can turn on a co-op cheat if you want to, to make co-op a little more interesting. So for instance one of them is called 'sticks and stones' - it takes away your gun, and all you have is an infinite supply of grenades, and your knife - but the grenades are all duds! So you can only kill the enemy by throwing 'rocks' at them basically, or stabbing them! That's a very difficult Death Card, there are others that are a little bit more easy, there are some that just make the game more crazy - you can turn them all on at the same time, and that's a very interesting kind of game to play! We're really looking forward to co-op being a incredible, different kind of experience and something uniquely Call of Duty. Plus there's a secret little co-op surprise for people who complete the game.

Kikizo: Broadly speaking did you have a frame of reference in terms of co-op with other games on the market?

Heller: It's actually really interesting that you ask that because any time that we tried to do co-op in a manner that we saw in another game, it just didn't seem like a fit for us. What we really wanted to give you the experience of is when you play Call of Duty you'll have redshirts - disposable soldiers - along with you, we wanted you to feel like one of your friends was now one of those redshirts. That was the experience we kept going for.

Kikizo: Are you happy with people calling this COD5? Is that going to interfere with later plans?!

Heller: You know, I think that numbers get old pretty fast, and I'll leave it at that!

Kikizo: Maybe you could call the next one COD 2009.

Heller: I think once you go past '3', numbers kind of suck.

Numbers suck: you heard it here first. Call of Duty: World at War is out today in North America and this Friday across Europe.

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