Infinity Ward’s creative strategist Robert Bowling has said via Twitter that the I-Ward/MW2 engine is still being used, and that the team have been adding major improvements to keep it up to the new FPS standards. He tweeted the following, “We haven’t gone into detail on the engine yet but we’ve moved beyond the MW2 engine and added a lot of cool stuff for #MW3.”
DICE and EA seem to feel that Activision have been allowing the CoD franchise to become sloppy, and aren’t enthusing their development teams out of lazy annual iterations. Battlefield 3 is practically openly challenging Modern Warfare 3 (and every other shooter out there in fact) to deliver a game that can match the raw power their Frostbite 2 engine radiates.
Rumours a while back indicated that Modern Warfare 3 may have adopted two of the standout ingredients from the Battlefield recipe: huge maps and destructible environments. Previously Mr Bowling told CVG that “We never – for any game – build a ‘brand new’ engine, but iterate on a solid base… adding what’s needed and innovates it.”
He went on to defend his studio: “The key point is the difference between inferring ‘nothing new’ and what we were actually discussing which was ‘ground-up’. This is standard, as near every engine currently in use by us and other developers are iterations on their previous codebase.”
So while not giving any specific details on Modern Warfare 3’s horsepower it appears that Infinity Ward, Sledgehammer, Raven, and whoever the heck else is contributing to the game may have something sneaky and surprising up their sleeve. Well I guess we will find out tonight when the first ever gameplay trailer airs during the NBA Western Conference Finals around 6pm PT (2 am UK).
Stay tuned folks; this year’s biggest battle could be set to heat up dramatically.
