Infinity Ward explains its decision to wave goodbye to Modern Warfare

May 30th, 2013, 00:02 Posted By: wraggster

What exactly is left of Infinity Ward? The FPS studio that invented the Call of Duty series and birthed the Modern Warfare phenomenon was left in ruins three years ago.
A dispute between the publisher and its studio founders over Modern Warfare 2 royalties and planned defections to EA saw 46 senior members of staff quit the team.
It forced Infinity Ward to team up with another Activision studio, the new Sledgehammer Games, to finish Modern Warfare 3. Online reports suggested this was the start of the end for Infinity Ward, bereft of leadership and doomed to a future of ‘co-developing’ the series it created.
But it wasn’t.
“Early on with Modern Warfare we decided we need to bring in someone to help us make that game,” says Infinity Ward’s executive producer Mark Rubin, one of the few long-serving members of staff to remain at the studio.
The plan, he explains, was to use partner studio Sledgehammer as cover while Infinity Ward returned “to full capacity at a pace that made sense to us. It wasn’t a situation where we went out and said ‘Shit, we need 50 more guys, go out there on the street and hire them.’ We were actually able to hire the people that we would have hired even if the Modern Warfare 2 thing hadn’t happened. We are now a fully fledged team. We are actually bigger than we have ever been before. That is the strangest thing for us, because with games getting harder and harder to make, it is taking more and more people. So this is something that would have happened regardless of that situation at all.”
Silver linings, then as the upheaval dovetailed with the ramp up for Call of Duty: Ghosts. This is not just a fresh start for Infinity Ward, but a new sub-brand in a series that celebrates its tenth birthday this year. Oh, and it was the crown jewel third-party game in this week’s Xbox reveal.
Ghosts still looks like Call of Duty; it’s still a cinematic war-based shooter, but with new visuals and a new story, penned by action Hollywood writer and director Stephen Gaghan (Traffic/Syriana).

http://www.mcvuk.com/news/read/infin...arfare/0116295

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