Crave Online: What makes the Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare engine such a kick ass engine?

Mark Lamia: Well, it starts with the tools in the pipeline that the developers get to use to get all the artwork and design into the game. It allows us to do really fast iteration time which sort of compounded on top of the time that we had to make this game and having that to start with and not having to worry about creating all that stuff allows us to frankly make the game better and just have more iteration time, more testing time, more polish and tuning. So we get to test our stuff and turn around really quickly. That's the first thing. The second thing is visually it allows us to do great graphics and that's kind of the foundation that we started from, but then we added in the stuff with all the fire and the water and the effects stuff that came along with doing the particular theater in the campaign that we wanted to do. Then obviously having that multiplayer technology as your foundation is just a tremendous leg up. It's battle tested out there by a lot of people. Just to have that as your foundation really allows us to concentrate on the game play elements that we want to introduce into the game play and not worry about the underlying tech. It allowed us as a jumping off point to figure out what we wanted to do with coop. We didn't have to worry about the technology underlying the competitive multiplayer. We could focus on a new technology challenge. So having a stable piece of technology like that and a pipeline that's stable from the start of development is critical. Having it perform like it does on all those platforms, it runs so well and is just a great piece of technology to work with.

Crave Online: What is the AI for the Japanese army?

Mark Lamia: Well, the Imperial Japanese, starting from as [our military advisor] Hank was telling me about where their mindset was and about how they had to fight as we came over there, we actually had to redo quite a bit of our scripting and our AI work because we'd been fighting more traditional line battles that are more commonplace in prior Call of Duty games. So we had to create this AI and this sort of guerilla warfare AI that looks at obstacles differently, that could look at a tree and see that as a hiding spot or that could take advantage of a spider hole or want to hide in brush. All that, or frankly when the chips are down, run at you with a grenade in its hand, in a very scary way. That's just not how the Germans fought or anything else.

Crave Online: You take away any thought of retreating.

Mark Lamia: It's not really an option if they keep coming at you, right. They're just going to come around you. It depends. Obviously, we tweak and we tune that with gameplay.

Crave Online: Why do you think the Japanese theater had not been attempted before?

Mark Lamia: I don't know the answer to that. I know why we wouldn't have attempted it on, for example, our last game because to do the Japanese theater properly, you have to create all that technology for the water and fire and the physics and all this new game play. So with Call of Duty 3, we had one year so you do what you know and you do it as well as you can inside that kind of time frame. In two years and the technology and everything else, we were able to look and say, "Hey, we wanted to do something new and different. We didn't want to make the same kind of World War II game that we had made before." So this is a totally new environment. The jungle environments, boom, that's totally new challenges, really cool stuff for the art and the graphics team and the designers get to look at those environments and figure out how they're going to play into the game differently. Then everything from that to how the enemies we were talking about, how you fight that enemy and how did it use its environment and natural surroundings to fight against you? That's just an entirely new gameplay that takes a while to tune and get right and develop for. So it's also very taxing to do graphically on the computer, To do those really thick jungle environments and be able to have all the physics associated with the water and the fire game play is pretty taxing. Especially when you've got coop and you've got guys wielding dual flamethrowers. That's pretty intense and since we're going to have up to four players and coop, if guys get a hold of that stuff and they're tearing up the environment and stuff like that, that's technically a difficult thing to do. And in order to do that part of the war faithfully, you have to allow people to do those kind of things.

Crave Online: We've seen flamethrowers in other games but what are the physics of a realistic flamethrower?

Mark Lamia: So it's a jellied gasoline so we actually model ours after that so that when it shoots out fire, it actually sticks to surfaces. Then of course it can actually catch fire to the natural environment. So brush and things like this you'll see as both visually, it's really fun and the destructive capacity of it's really fun but it's also going to be used very tactically I think to clear areas and make sure there are not enemies there, to kill enemies in those areas, to blow out bunkers and things like that. But it'll catch in those areas and it'll catch wind and it'll take off. It's not just a simple "I'm shooting fire, there's a scorch effect. If it hits something, it will affect but doesn’t do anything else." Ours will actually hang around and if it's material that it should be catching hold of in the natural environment, it'll take off and destroy it.

Crave Online: Is rope really a new thing for games?

Mark Lamia: Just the idea of adding these kind of physical properties inside of this engine is new. What we're doing with rope stuff is we're looking at all the natural applications of how the physical properties apply to something on a rope, so in a war game, having realistic physics associated with having a guy hung up in a tree who was coming down on a parachute. Or, in particular, it came out of as we were modeling and trying to prototype the situation associated with what the Japanese soldiers would do, they'd actually tie themselves in the tree and since they could wait there for days on end, they needed to tie themselves to the tree so that if they fell out, they wouldn't kill themselves. Rather than just having the guys fall out of the tree and thud, it was what they would do. If they fell out of the tree, they would dangle there. It viscerally, visually is a different sort of thing too for the players.

Crave Online: How does the player set one of those log traps you demoed?

Mark Lamia: Well, that's a game play device that's being prototyped. We didn’t demonstrate it today but the idea is you could have a log trap in the game set up as something that you could trigger for effect. It's actually a prototype thing we were showing you in the test level.

Crave Online: Where do the detailed graphics come from? Were there trips to Japan?

Mark Lamia: We do a ton of research. There have been people who've gone to Japan who've done this but we get all kinds of research from all over the place. All the reference materials we get of those areas and those environments are authentic. We've always done that for all of our Call of Duty games. There are people who have been to some of those places who say, "Yeah, that's actually what that kinda looked like."

Crave Online: It must not be fun to research realistic, graphic war wounds but how important is that?

Mark Lamia: It's actually something that we debated quite a bit. What you saw today, on say the guys who got burned, was not the first thing that we had. We tried a bunch of different stuff. We tried, "Oh, maybe we just kind of scorch him up a little bit." We've gone the other way and maybe if you really had him burn, how would it be? Try to find what gets across the fact that something has been burned was a very difficult thing to do. Or a bullet wound is a very difficult thing to do. We don't strive to make something gratuitously gory. There are some horror games for example and things like that where that is actually what they're actually trying to do. We're just trying to make sure that in a mature way, there is some feedback if you're doing something in a way that makes you think, "Yeah, okay, that's what I'd expect it to be" but in a game way, not in a real life kind of way.

Crave Online: Are there any bases on actual Japanese campaigns from WWII?

Mark Lamia: Yeah, so there was an actual Carlson's Raiders, Makin Raid was actually a mission. Now, we didn't take someone's personal account of that situation, but Carlson's Raiders did do an invasion of that Makin atoll. The battles at Peleliu for the airfield, what we'll be doing later on that we talked about with Okinawa. Those are all based off historical battles. The World War II Call of Duty games have always had that as a tenet in making sure there is authenticity in that but we've always made a game, not tried to tell somebody's real story in that we try to tell what an authentic experience would be inside of that.

Crave Online: You mentioned in the demo that there are problems doing the Wii version. What might you have to sacrifice for the benefit of using the zapper or remote?

Mark Lamia: We're not going to sacrifice anything. What I would say is it's been difficult to make the Wii game. It's a powerful game and telling the designers to not concern themselves with the lower system requirements, just make the best game you can, has just meant that I've had to hire a lot of people to resource that to get a piece of technology that hasn't existed on the platform yet, on the platform. Then of course having the designers and the artists get with that, it was a problem because you don't have as many buttons for example on the Wii zapper. We'll show that later to you. It is actually functional. We can test it but you just lose buttons and we use almost all the buttons. So it's a problem but we've found clever ways around how to do that and make it really enjoyable for the Wii player. I think people who have the zapper are going to be pretty satisfied.