With the beta out today, I’m reflecting back a bit…
#MW4 Dev story time!
I was looking at all the positive comments on the opening scene of our game and as this was one of the first things we made, I thought I’d share a bit of how it came to life.
VERY early in development, when discussing how to introduce the new US/ROK marines, we got excited about a single shot that followed a Wu-tang blasting earbud around from character to character. We were inspired to create dialogue that grounded the characters while revealing the unique personalities of each young man.
But looking for the people to play these roles was an interesting, exhausting search. After months of casting, before officially assigning roles, we brought our candidates in for a chemistry test. Young, Jae, Will, Ki Hong, Daniel and Joon (hadn’t found Luke yet!) played with us, improvising and finding the scene… they added pieces to these characters that influenced reshaping the dialogue and blocking.
On the shoot day, the guys continued discovering, finding idiosyncrasies and spontaneous improvisation… we got to respond to the performance in real time by adjusting the camera against the changing blocking.
What resulted was a massive collaboration between narrative, animation, performance capture and the acting. This was accentuated by the driven team back at IW, pushing animation, lighting, art, vehicles, FX and sound to create a something better than the sum of its parts.
This scene represents the best part about working in video games - a creative collaboration that changes as new ideas are discovered, stays curious but focused, and allows for the vision of a scene to organically grow into something greater than the original spark.
Thanks for all the positive vibes from y’all - it’s fueling the teams’ to deliver the best MW yet. My personal favorite thing is that this is only part of the opening scene 😎
Looking forward to hearing more thoughts about this and the rest of the game when it’s out in October - yall ain’t ready 🤙
@CallofDuty @InfinityWard
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@GBH_23