Call of Duty: World at War Preview

VideoGamer.com: You're now doing a multiplayer beta. What do you hope to get out of that?

NH: The beta is coming pretty late for us, but we wanted to give something that was a little bit more polished. We're doing a lot of back end optimisations right now. If we find something from a balance perspective that's egregious obviously we would look at seeing to fix it, but this is more about learning lessons, learning what people think about the balance so that we can support the title for a long time to come. We're very interested in doing things like map packs and stuff like that for the future.

VideoGamer.com: Given the timing of the beta there won't be much time to react to any problems you find.

NH: It's true but the back end optimisations we can do because we use DemonWare which is Activision's back end, and those are actually significant. Every day goes by and we say, 'this many concurrent users, they're hitting our stat site like this, this is how they're hitting our security gateways or what have you', that actually teaches us a lot.

VideoGamer.com: What are your plans for the beta?

NH: Right now there are three maps and right now the level cap is at 11, but sometime soon we're going to raise that probably to the 20s or so, and we may raise it to unlimited before the beta ends just so people can really try everything out.

VideoGamer.com: I'd imagine the game is almost finished if not finished already. When are you looking at going gold?

NH: Pretty soon. It's out in mid-November. We were just kind of putting the finishing touches on it last month, now it's more about managing the beta and making sure everything is fitting together the way it should. But we're pretty much at that point.

VideoGamer.com: So how does it feel? This is the first time you've had two years to do a CoD game.

NH: You saw us a good couple months ago and we were saying, 'thank goodness we finally had enough time to make a game'. We stood back now and I like to think it speaks for itself. It's a pretty polished game and it has a lot of heart in it, and I think people that play it will genuinely see the effort that went into it, and that's rewarding for us. It's been a crazy and humbling experience but we're very grateful we've had the time to work on the game and we're grateful we can turn around and tell our bosses, 'look what we can do when we have the time to do it, look what we can create'. And that's humbling.

VideoGamer.com: Is it the game that will convince the cynics about your credentials as a development studio compared to Infinity Ward?

NH: Infinity Ward is a great studio and there's always going to be great studios. I think that the game will speak for itself and it will show people that we're a serious studio that people should take notice of. I'm not going to compare us to Infinity Ward but I will say that everyone who is involved in the CoD brand holds it to the highest degree and we feel like we're finally approaching the bar that we needed to approach, and that's a significant thing for us. So when it comes to the time for us to make our next game, or even when it comes time to make the next map packs or anything else connected to this game, we're going to know that that bar is set pretty high.

It was hard coming out to see people six or seven months ago and say, 'we know the bar is set very low, let us convince you why we can raise the bar', but we'd much rather know that the bar is high and have to meet a new bar. Basically I think we're happy to say the game speaks for itself and we hope when people look at future Treyarch games they'll say, 'you need to give us a game as good as World at War'.

VideoGamer.com: What are your DLC plans for World at War? You've mentioned map packs but can you go further than that and perhaps add to the campaign?

NH: We're not announcing anything specific yet but I will say we're going to support this game very aggressively. We're definitely looking at doing things other than traditional DLC. We're definitely looking at supporting it for a long time to come because we're really proud of it. There will be a few surprises, but you're definitely right that we're going to do a few things off the beaten path.

VideoGamer.com: Adding to a campaign isn't something we're used to seeing in terms of DLC for first-person shooters. Is it technically possible?

NH: One of the wonderful things about co-op is there's no such thing any more really as just here's the single-player game and it never gets touched again. I can't confirm anything we might do, but the idea of adding new online co-op missions is definitely something that's been discussed a lot. And if co-op proves to be very popular then I'm sure the demand will be very high for it.

VideoGamer.com: Can you give the fans any indication of how long they'll have to wait after release for the first batch of DLC?

NH: I'm not allowed to say anything about that but I will say that fans of this game will not be sorry for the amount of support we give it, because we're intending to really support it. We've people working on it right now, and believe me those are very tired people.

VideoGamer.com: Are you thinking about your next CoD game?

NH: Oh no. We're still thinking about this CoD game. There are people way above my head that are thinking about the next CoD game and at some point they'll come to us and talk to us about it perhaps.

VideoGamer.com: Are you guys getting tired of doing CoD games, would you like to try your hand at something else?

NH: Oh no. We love CoD. CoD has grown as a brand. It used to be here's a rar rar WWII game and now it's about a soldier's story, and we're pleased to make any game that tells a soldier's story.

VideoGamer.com: What did you think of the latest Brothers in Arms game?

NH: I can't make any comment on a competitor's game. I can't give you anything on the record, I'm sorry. I will say we're proud that we were able to do some storytelling with our game and I hope we show we can tell a different story than the traditional WWII story.

VideoGamer.com: Thanks for your time.

Call of Duty: World at War is due out for Xbox 360, PS3, PC, Wii, PS2 and Nintendo DS on November 14.