In Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, the game is supposed to evaluate the player’s behavior and respond to it. With various dialogues, NPCs will react when a player makes wrong decisions and endangers innocents.
This is the basic idea of Modern Warfare: The new Call of Duty is supposed to be “as realistic as possible” and depict real combat operations with all their uncertainties.
This includes the fact that in the new shooter, civilians play a bigger role than in earlier games. And the player can also injure the bystanders.
It is now stated in an interview on the site Kotaku with Design Director Jakob Minkoff, that Call of Duty: Modern Warfare is supposed to determine:
- “whether a damn psycho is playing who shoots at everything”
- or whether someone reasonable is playing who wants to do their job as a soldier, and is frustrated by a mistake: “Oh God, I made a mistake and feel really bad”
Minkoff says: “The game will try to find out if the player is such a psycho or trying to do their job.”
Many algorithms will be running in the background for this.
NPCs speak differently to the bad guys
What happens when you make mistakes? If you make nasty but forgivable mistakes, the NPCs are supposed to react differently to the player. They should let him feel his misconduct.
The story itself is linear, but in the context of the mission, there will be hints like: “Buddy, what did you just do? Damn it. I hope no one ever finds out about this.”
The Design Director talks about branching dialogues with allies. Minkoff even says that some animated scenes would change.
With these changes, Minkoff wants to increase the sensitivity of the players to how difficult a soldier’s job is.
This is how collateral damage is punished: However, it is not clear from the interview what consequences it has to be “a damn psycho who shoots at everything” – it only says “okay.”
In another interview, Minkoff explained that players have a score “collateral damage”, which deteriorates when players shoot at civilians.
The value decreases with mistakes and deteriorates the reward when too many innocents are killed.
