3D Bullets, Taunting, and Ear Hair: How Three Teams Remastered Modern Warfare

Of the three panels scheduled for this year's Call of Duty XP event, "The Making of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare Remastered" was by far the most crowded. The original Modern Warfare is widely considered not only the shooter series' greatest entry, but one of the most influential games of the last ten years. And at an event dedicated to celebrating the series, it's no surprise the Forum Club's lounge area was chock-full of both fans and press who want to know if Remastered will do right by the legacy of the original.

David Pelis, Studio Director at Raven, was more than aware of the game's reputation. "At Raven, we were very excited and very terrified."

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare Remastered is the product of three studios: Raven Software (which has worked on several Call of Duty games in the past), Certain Affinity (which has worked on multiplayer maps for Call of Duty: World at War, Black Ops, and Ghosts), and Beenox (which ported Black Ops III to the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360). The panel included Pelis, Co-Studio Head at Beenox Thomas Wilson, Design Director at Certain Affinity, David Mertz, Lead Designer at Infinity Ward, Mike Denny, and Designer at Infinity Ward Oscar Lopez, with Activision's Jeremy Sohl moderating. As the panel began, the team made it clear their goal was to update the game to today's standards without altering the the gameplay.

"For us the number-one thing was making sure it was responsive, that the AI fights you just like in the original," said Mertz. People remember not just the "feel" of a game like Modern Warfare, but also visual cues, sounds, and motions. These things all bleed together to create the fond memories players have with the game.

But Pelis also wanted to add something to the experience and make sure the game was more than upscaling of textures. "We wanted to redefine the remaster. [We didn't want to] mess with gameplay, but we did want to add more personality."

The most noticeable alteration to the game, which we noted in our hands-on preview of Remastered's multiplayer, was the game's sound. The voice samples were the same, but the sound bites were slightly different. This is because the team dove into the audio from the original game and decided to rework it. The original Modern Warfare used single-channel WAV files, which the Remastered team transformed into multi-channel files. This allowed them to add greater depth to each sound; the thunk of a grenade hitting the ground, for example, is now accompanied by the smaller sounds of the debris the grenade displaced hitting nearby objects.

The panel also showed off several of the updated character models in the game. The panel showed off Captain Price's famous whiskers, which are now individually modeled, as well as new aging and pock marks. "We didn't create his backstory, but we were gonna show it," said Pelis. They also showed an updated Imran Zakhaev, who now has ear hair. New lighting and texturing methods added detail to every scene without altering its mood. Stronger hardware also means the blur on a helicopter's blades can be naturally rendered instead of being separate texture, and allows the same 3D model of a bullet to sit in a gun's chamber, be fired, and fall to the floor.

The remaster was also a chance for the team to revisit memories of creating the game. During a series of comparison shots, Lopez mentioned how Senior Environment Artist Velinda Pelayo ended up as the helicopter pilot your character rescues in the mission "Shock and Awe." "We actually modeled her entire head," said Lopez. "I don't think she's seen the new [model]."

Lopez also mentioned how one of the core tenants of the original Modern Warfare was making sure the player never lost full control of their character. Even during the most scripted sequences (such as after the nuclear bomb goes off in "Shock and Awe"), you still exerted some amount of control. In Remastered, the team is doing everything they can to make sure that "body feel" is augmented with new visuals, such as your hands showing up when you're rappelling out of the helicopter in the mission "Crew Expendable," or your left arm showing up as you're crawling around in "All Ghillied Up." In "Shock and Awe," your character will now put their hand up in front of them to protect themselves from the blinding light of the nuke.

Finally, the team went into more detail about the one change in Remastered mapped to a button: taunting. By pressing down on the d-pad, your soldier will take a closer look at their gun, which will show up on the killcam your opponent sees. Some taunts include a simple inspection, while a few have you flicking a spec of dirt off the gun. These don't affect gameplay, but can add a bit of impact to a kill players think is worth calling attention to.

It's clear Raven, Certain Affinity, and Beenox hold Modern Warfare in high regard. They were adamant about not altering the core of what Infinity Ward crafted nearly ten years ago, but felt a love of the game that guided all the enhancements of the Remaster. The different sounds, textures, and animations may not recreate the memories you may have had of the game, but if everything goes well, they should go a long way of creating plenty of new ones.

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare Remastered will launch on November 4 as bonus in the Legacy and Digital Deluxe editions of Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare.

3D Bullets, Taunting, and Ear Hair: How Three Teams Remastered Modern Warfare
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