In an interview with
CVG,
Sledgehammer general manager Glen Schofield confronted the issue of
Call of Duty’s aging engine head-on: “I’ve worked on a lot of engines
over my lifetime and spent a lot of time putting graphics in to them and
this thing is Porsche. And what I mean by that is that it is
stream-lined, everything in it is perfectly freaking clean. You can tell
it’s been worked on for years. It’s easy to upgrade.”
Sledgehammer is co-developing Modern Warfare 3, and Schofield is sick
of hearing implications that the Call of Duty engine’s age will result
in a less impressive game.
“If you put Modern Warfare 2 next to Modern Warfare 3 you would see a
huge difference,” he said. “Look at all the character models, look at
all the gun models, look at the reflections, look at the water. There is
so much that we’ve added, so when someone says ‘cut and paste’, I don’t
even want to talk to them because they don’t know. They just don’t
know. They have no idea.”
Schofield points out that the great advantage with the Call of Duty
engine is that it is easy to work with, which enables faster, easier
iteration and ultimately higher-quality. “People don’t think about this
but when you make your tools better and you can iterate twice as many
times, you make the game better. So instead of going, ‘Well, I’d really
like to move that guy over an inch, that would actually make it better.’
And people going, ‘Ah, that’s a pain in the arse. I’m not going to move
him’. Imagine multiplying that over 200 times, 300 times, a 1,000 times
over the course of the game. By not moving something, you’re really
affecting quality. With the tools we’ve added, maybe we can move them.
The more you can iterate, the better the game will be.”
Subject: Interesting take on the IW engine. 
Mon Oct 17, 2011 7:19 pm
