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"In a new interview with Polygon, Taylor Kurosaki spoke at length the goal Infinity Ward is trying to achieve with Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare. The team has been putting a focus on establishing Infinite Warfare as its own sub franchise in the Call of Duty universe, similar to Modern Warfare and Black Ops."
“We want to establish our own new subfranchise. Our own new branch of the Call of Duty tree. What we are developing here could certainly support multiple games. We’re trying to develop a very rich world that we’re not even close to exhausting.”Infinity Ward’s last go at Call of Duty was met with bad reception from fans and press alike, some even claiming it took a step back in the franchise after Black Ops 2’s innovations from Treyarch. Call of Duty: Ghosts failed to establish itself in the Call of Duty world, and lived and died as a one off title in the universe. As of now, Infinity Ward has no plans to revisit that title, regardless of how the first ones’ campaign ended. With Ghosts, there was confusion around what Infinity Ward was trying to do: create a one-off title after working on Modern Warfare or try to establish a new brand. With Infinite Warfare, there’s no such confusion, they say.
Kurosaki said, “I can’t speak to what the intentions were when the team was working on Ghosts.” Kurosaki and Minkoff both joined Infinity Ward in 2014, transitioning from working on the award winning ‘The Last of Us’ at Naughty Dog.
Uncharted, Last of Us ... Call of Duty?
In fashioning a compelling story, in creating a successful narrative-driven single-player game, it’s not a competition between the story and the gameplay, Kurosaki said.
"Gameplay is the personification of the narrative, and the narrative is the support, the glue that holds the gameplay together," he said. "I’ve never made a first-person shooter before; it’s a very interesting challenge. As a player you don’t really get to occupy the shoes — or the boots, in this case — of a character like you can in first person."
Nor should the multiplayer of a game, no matter how popular, be completely removed from the campaign, according to Kurosaki.
"I think when you are playing multiplayer, all of that should be framed by the experience you had in the single-player," he said. "The single-player is the toehold into this new story universe."
The same was true for the games he worked on at Naughty Dog, where single-player was obviously king.
"Having the multiplayer without the single-player portion, it loses something; you lose your context," he said. "I think of my work here as incredibly important both in terms of telling war stories, meaningful stories, and with creating meaningful characters. Rich characters that are believable, that have a life before the events of our story and relationships [that] extend before the events of the story. That’s the stuff that is interesting to me."
In bringing this approach to Call of Duty, Kurosaki said that he sees this as an opportunity to infuse and support those big set pieces and action moments with an even deeper, more meaningful story. A narrative that’s richer, that has characters "you’re going to love to want to occupy the boots of."
More at:
http://www.polygon.com/2016/8/19/12525612/redesigning-call-of-duty
http://charlieintel.com/2016/08/19/...sub-franchise-multiple-games-not-like-ghosts/