Ever since 2005, COD games have come yearly with a new story based on the idea of fighting with your fellow solders in the battlefield. It is hard to imagine a time when COD was not part of the showcase of E3 or near the top of a gamer’s wish list. Long before Black Ops, war in the future and even zombies, Infinity Ward decided in 2003 to try and make a realistic war game set in World War II. The result would be Call of Duty, a game that brought invention to the war video game.
The gameplay is about exploring three stories on the Allied side of WWII. Private Martin is a member of the 506th Infantry Regiment for the USA. His missions start with going behind enemy lines in preparation of D-Day. Sergeant Jack Evans from Britain and his team try to destroy German infrastructure and also steal information vital to the Allies. Corporal Alexei Ivanovich Voronin of the Soviet Union must survive the horrors of Battle of Stalingrad before pushing into German territory. These three stories take place in the past and also concurrently with each other.
The team who developed this game took great pains to make it as realistic as possible. Weapons were researched down to the sounds they made in battle. Prior to Call of Duty, most of the war games provided an experience where a character would be off on his own in the battle. Infinity Ward decided that they wanted to create a game where you had to relay on the support of your squad to succeed. A player could not just run in guns blazing, you had to take cover, wait for the right moment before you proceeded.
The AI of the squad was one of Call of Duty’s greatest successes. You did not tell the other characters what to do, they were programmed to do their own thing. They would lay down cover war as you moved from cover to cover. This type of AI made it so that you could play the game multiple time and the NPCs would act differently ever time. The shell-shock status, received after being near an explosion, would muffle sounds, blurred vision and force your character to walk.
The game was in the top ten of games sold the year it was released and received numerous Game of the Year awards. It launched a franchise that has been going strong for over ten years. The game was rereleaased in 2009 with updated graphics for the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. If you never played the game that started it all, give this one a look. It still holds up all these years later.
