Treyarch studio head Mark Lamia almost canceled Call of Duty: World at War's zombie mode, which was easily one of the best recent additions to the series.

Work on zombies was initially started by a "creatively restless" team, said Lamia during his DICE talk this morning. The work was "unapproved, unplanned, and unscheduled," and "clearly off brand," but when Lamia was called to cancel the mode and direct the development team to finish the game as planned, he chose not to. The team was enjoying the mode so much, he said, that work on it continued even though they were behind schedule.

Even after Lamia made the case to go ahead with the mode, Activision apparently wasn't convinced enough to market Zombies, which is why it went out quietly as an unlockable. That decision, said Lamia, allowed fans to discover it and share it and "make it their own."

Lamia concluded with the thought that "Zombies taught Treyarch that it's OK to touch the butterfly's wings," referring to the risk of tinkering with a series as established as CoD. "Just don't do it with sticky fingers," he said.

Some cheeky blighters have obtained what Activision are calling a “development demo build” of Black Ops 2, and uploaded a vid to prove it. It’s an extremely short snippet of action, and overlayed with a superfluous dev interview and some dreadful music, but it does show off the capabilities of the engine.

Spotted on Kotaku, the video sees the player activate a no-clip mode, allowing the camera to zip off, around and above a rather pretty hillside township - which the player then proceeds to fill the the bodies of his foes. A crossbow makes a brief cameo and the video ends with the player running about making 'finger guns' at the enemy - a returning weapon from previous CoDs accessible via the 'giveall' cheat.

The original video has been removed, as you’d expect, but it came from the channel of Call of Duty modder iHc James. Kotaku still have a working version at the time of writing, if you are that needy of your BlOps fix.

When you shoot someone in Call of Duty, there’s a noise. It's positive feedback—a fwip-fwip-fwip to let you know that your bullet, knife, claymore, or phoned-in helicopter is hurting someone. While visiting Treyarch I asked the Black Ops 2 sound team about the creation of the simple-but-essential effect.

PCG: Why does it sound the way it does when I shoot someone in Call of Duty?

Brian Tuey, Audio Director: So... The sound has impact and it has meaning and it's useful and all that, but it's not a particularly pleasant sound, especially in isolation. There was a time recently where I was like, "You know? I'm gonna redo this with something else." So I kinda went a different direction, and it felt like this was going to be good. I checked it in, and within three hours, my email box was full of, like, "WHAT ARE YOU DOING TO MY SOUND?" I'm like, "But it's so much better!"

Chris Cowell, Audio Lead: The other thing that you might not actually know, it's different every game.

Really?

Cowell: It has to be. They're all very similar, and they serve the same purpose, but the actual content and the creation of it is redone every game, because our guns sound differently, you know? The music's different, the situation's different...

Tuey: Our whole DSP chain in the engine is completely different. The same stuff doesn't sound the same anymore.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yHs1sOdcuEE

Cowell: Little things like that can be a really difficult sound to make. The last game, it took me weeks to get that little thing right, because you have to fire it, get the tick and hear it and know what it means.

Tuey: But it has to cut through the guns, the explosions, and give you the same exact feeling you had when you heard it last game.

Cowell: Yeah. It's the same experience. That experience needs to be consistent across all of them, but not the sound.

Tuey: And that's what the problem was with the new one I dropped in, it sounded different. So the experience was different, so people who were playing the game didn't even know I'd changed it, right? It's not like we make a big production about, "Hey, I changed this sound!" Well, sometimes we do. But usually we just want to see what people's reactions are.

What did it sound like when you changed it?

Tuey: I made it sound more like a bullet hitting somebody, as opposed to a tick. But it's more important for us that the gameplay aspect of it is supported, versus "Hey, now it sounds more real."

Shawn Jimmerson, Sound Designer: You want to know that your bullet has hit someone, especially in MP. You're firing and you want that immediate feedback that I am actually scoring hits. There's a lot of expectation, you know, even in films, when somebody punches somebody else, it's not a realistic sound...

Cowell: Whpssh!

Jimmerson: But people have that expectation. Within our community, there's that same sort of thing. There are certain things that you just don't want to mess with too much, because you just upset people who are playing your game.



About a year ago in Team Fortress 2 I changed my hit sound to the Sonic "ring." It’s pretty Pavlovian, it's a good incentive for shooting people.

Cowell: Yeah, that's a good one. That's another good classic sound that has a lot of meaning behind it. When you hear those sounds, that tink-tink-tink-tink, and you're like, "Yeah!"

Tuey: It probably took a sound designer weeks to make that just right.

Cowell: To get it just right, that stuff's really hard.

Tuey: Just for nobody to ever go, "Whoa, that's a really awesome sound."

Cowell: But then you know you love it, you know, when you put it in there. It's the same thing, you know? It's giving you that... "I know what that means" feeling.

Jimmerson: I was just going to say, one of our sound designers had a great observation the other day, that there's no correlation between the time it takes to work on a sound and the significance of the sound in the game in a visual sense. Like, a helicopter can crash, and I'm like, "Okay, I know this is going to have metal, an explosion, a fireball, all these different elements," but what does it sound like when you interface with this thing and say "Yes”? Or you push that button? What does that sound like? The simplest sound can take you so much longer to work on. And again, usually if you get it to a place where it's right, no one will ever think about it, necessarily. And that's good. People should be like, "Oh, of course it sounds like that when I interact with this future thing that I've never seen before and doesn't even exist."

Call of Duty Elite is still coming to PC, Eurogamer report. Activision Producer, Noah Heller has been talking to the website about the stat tracking service, which currently supports Modern Warfare 3 on consoles, but not PC: "We're still working on it. We can't date it yet. It's a challenging piece of development."

Noah pointed out that he holds some loyalty towards our platform of choice. ""Back in the day I was a PC gamer myself. I cut my teeth on shooters on good, old fashioned Team Fortress 1. So I'm excited to do right by the PC players soon."

Call of Duty Elite lets players track their Modern Warfare 3 stats, and access all DLC and specialist playlists. There are also in-depth tuition videos to help players improve their skills. Console gamers are required to pay a subscription for the more advanced aspects of the service, including tournaments and clan capabilities.

A tweet back in November implied that we will be getting Elite on PC, and that it would be free. Whether our version will feature-identical to the console versions is yet to be announced. Heller was reluctant to confirm a release date.

"Unfortunately I can't give you a date at this time - look, it bums me out to say it," he concluded.

The Verge have reported on a top secret Call of Duty game that was in development five months before the release of the first Modern Warfare. Call of Duty: Devil’s Brigade was cancelled nine months in to development, was a third-person affair, and focused on the “superheroes” of WWII who later inspired the formation of the Green Berets and the Canadian Special Operations forces Command.

Activision cancelled the project in 2007. The dev team included Jason VandenBerghe, current creative director on Far Cry 3, along with Scott Bandy and Trevor Jalowitz, who now work for Activision. They called themselves Underground Development.

VandenBerghe quotes Infinity Ward’s dominance as one of the reasons for the cancellation: "If the IW guys say they want to control the Call of Duty IP, they don't even have to say our name. We just got sideswiped. And that happens. I don't begrudge them for that."

Lead designer, Kyle Brink says the Vivendi/Blizzard merger was also a factor: “As is normal in a merger, you do everything you can to clean up your balance sheet. A studio that isn't in full production on a title with major revenue attached to it, which is about to ask for tens of millions in development dollars, is a great candidate for closure.”

Here are a bundle of screenshots and a few seconds of footage. Warning: console commands feature below. As do low-res textures and basic geometry.

Can you imagine an alternate reality where Devil's Brigade exists? What's it like?

Cancelled COD by u64backup

The Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 'Rank Up XP' promotion spotted by Forbes will put codes on bottles of Mountain Dew and packets of Doritos crisps that give players double XP time in-game.

So when you take a headshot from a high level sniper rifle, you won't be able to tell if they've played more of the game guzzled a truckload of potato chips. Perhaps the guy heading a server with every unlock is quite good at Call of Duty, or he's just consumed more litres of luminous energy drink than you.

There's apparently no limit to the lengths marketers are prepared to go to shift a big new game, but cheapening your entire unlock and experience system for the sake of a drinks promotion crosses a line we didn't even know existed.

Where will this end? They should rename the series Call of Dewty and replace all of the grenades with exploding cans of soft drink. Claymores can be packets of Doritos that explode when enemies approach, shredding them with a cloud of tasty nacho shrapnel. Then they'll see a kill cam replay of their maizy death, sponsored by Pepsi, of course.

Call of Duty: Black Ops Rezurrection came out on Friday. The pack adds five new arenas to Call of Duty: Black Ops' zombie survival mode, except four of them aren't new at all. Nacht der Untoten, Verruckt, Shi No Numa and Der Riese are all "remastered" versions of zombie maps from Call of Duty: World at War, released in 2008.

That means 80% of the map pack is made up of recycled, three year old content. What's more, those who bought the Hardened and Prestige editions of Call of Duty: Black Ops received the new maps as part of the deal last year. The asking price? £11.50 / $14.99. This has to stop.

Most of the advertising for Rezurrection so far has understandably concentrated on the new lunar map. Moon is good. It's funny, spooky, tremendously gory thanks to the new wave gun, and generally a blast with friends, but as the only fresh piece of content in the whole pack, it can't possibly justify the price tag. To put it in perspective, for just a few bucks more you can pick up the superb Left 4 Dead 2, which comes with five core campaigns, each of which are four or five times larger than a Call of Duty zombie arena.

The success of First Strike, Escalation and Annihilation prove that a certain percentage of Call of Duty's enormous fan base will shell out for a slim collection of virtual architecture, and no doubt just as many will buy Rezurrection, even though four fifths of it is made up of used goods.



Re-using old maps is nothing new, of course, and it's not a practice that's exclusive to the Call of Duty series either. Battlefield 3's Back to Karkand pack consists entirely of re-engineered maps and weapons from Battlefield 2, but there's a difference between putting a new spin on a classic map, and reheating stale content. When ported into a new engine, with updated Battlefield 3 classes and mechanics, old architecture can be made to feel fresh and worthwhile. Rezurrection doesn't. The updates consist of some upgraded lighting tech, and some weapon spawn tweaks. It feels like artificial padding designed to meet a ludicrous price point, and is only the very latest in a stream of overpriced DLC packs. Call of Duty fans deserve better.

Modern Warfare 3 is out in November, with a new DLC strategy. Subscribers to the Call of Duty: Elite network will receive smaller collections of new maps on a month by month basis. It will be interesting to see if we get many remastered Modern Warfare 2 maps appearing as part of the deal, or maybe a few from the original Modern Warfare.

It's a lot quicker to take an old map and spruce it up than to make something entirely new, but we're not talking about a small studio putting out their first release. This is Call of Duty. The biggest shooter in the world. Surely we can do better than Rezurrection.

 
Call of Duty: Black Ops Rezurrection is out this Thursday, bringing us the mad new zombie map, Moon, and four other remastered zombie survival missions from Call of Duty: World at War. Yes, it's yet another Call of Duty: Black Ops map pack, but this may well be the best of the bunch. The zombie maps have consistently been the best part of the rest of the DLC, with brand new enemies and some memorable weapons. The Moon map will have its own selection of mad weaponry, including moon grenades. See them action in the truly disgusting new Rezurrection trailer above. Everyone will earn double XP this weekend in Black Ops to celebrate the last bit of CoD DLC before Modern Warfare 3 arrives. But will it be worth $14.99 / £11:49? Hmmm.

As reported on Gamasutra, Call of Duty: Elite has already had two million sign-ups. The massive figure was announced on the blog of Activision's Dan Amrich.

Exact details as to how the new service will work are yet to be announced. According to Amrich, the final service will evolve depending on feedback taken from the beta anyway. He also mentions that fans of the series shouldn't be discouraged by the popularity of the service, saying "Two million volunteers among 30 million Call of Duty players is a small amount. More would be even better. Once you’ve signed up, just watch your email inbox for an invite."

We do know that Elite will let you obsess over your stats to an unhealthy degree, there will be free and paid versions of the service, and that some form of TV show will be incorporated, featuring "top Hollywood Talent."

As far as we can tell, it's going to be a bit like a Facebook profile, but where every picture, status update, and awkward message will be COD-focussed. Your photos will feature camo, your status updates will be concerned with weapon attachment unlocks, and your messages will be littered with words like n00b t00b and base-rape. It'll support Call of Duty: Black Ops and the upcoming Modern Warfare 3.

Read more about Call of Duty Elite in Activision's latest FAQ, and sign up for the beta here. Amrich has created a handy information hub too - what a nice chap.