Five years in development, the new Infinity Ward engine is finally in the hands of Call of Duty players in the rebooted Modern Warfare. It’s a brilliant example of the late-gen multi-platform game – where long years of experience working with a fixed platform architecture pay dividends with some exceptionally impressive audio-visuals. Realism is on a new level compared to prior COD offerings, lighting and animation are radically improved, the interaction between illumination and materials is spot-on and the sheer level of detail delivered by the new technology is hugely impressive. This is an engine designed to scale – not just across today’s consoles and up to the fastest ray tracing-capable PC graphics cards – but also to the generation of Sony and Microsoft machines.
Of course, another aspect of the late-gen multi-platform game is that sometimes the scale of the ambition isn’t quite a match for the available power of the consoles and it’s fair to say that Infinity Ward treads a fine line here. Modern Warfare is a treat to play, but the enjoyment of Call of Duty is tied closely to performance – and there are key differences between platforms here, something that is all the more relevant owing to the game’s forward-looking approach to cross-play.
Meanwhile, Infinity Ward’s dedication to a smooth, filmic look to its visuals means that there are some very obvious differences between consoles – yes, resolutions are very different, but while we have pixel-count data for all machines, image quality is more about rather than traditional artefacts like ‘jaggies’, pixel-popping or temporal shimmer. Not all aspects of the presentation are rendered at native resolution either, further muddying the waters.
What we do get is a feature-complete experience across all systems, from a launch era Xbox One right up to the latest and greatest RTX 2080 Ti-equipped gaming PC. That means the beautiful new lighting system is a core foundation of the game, interacting perfectly with the physically based materials pipeline that delivers highly realistic weapons, clothing and environmental surfaces. This augmented still further by a vast increase in detail. Tessellation is used liberally on all systems, and core geometry is up by a factor of 5x compared to prior COD titles.