Call Of Duty: Advanced Warfare – The titan returns to dominate the battlefield

By now, many of you will have seen the Advanced Warfare reveal trailer. As somebody who considered Ghosts a misstep for the series, I expected to be totally disinterested in the latest outing. As soon as Spacey started ranting and exoskeletal mercenaries began shooting, I had to take notice. It was a very good trailer.

For starters, the game finally looks to be have ridden or at least massively improved the graphics engine that’s held the series back for so long. Last year’s entry looked the same as 2009’s Modern Warfare 2, inexcusable for the first next-gen COD, even though cross-gen development can’t have helped.

Advanced Warfare impresses from the opening frames: exo-mercs patrolling a camp before a series of fighter drones fly across a beach, all captured on an Xbox One.

Then we meet Kevin Spacey. Playing Jonathan Irons – or ‘Robo-Spacey’ as I will affectionately refer to him – casting one of Hollywood’s best actors is a risky move, especially coupled with the use of his likeness, as it can often be hard to separate the man from the role.

It seems that Sledgehammer is making every attempt to do more than give the franchise a new lick of paint: this Call of Duty presents a very real interpretation of current events, as the Vice-partnered (and ever-so-slightly terrifying) trailer attests.

With all this said, however, in order for Advanced Warfighter to stand tall this holiday season, it needs to couple visual and narrative evolution with gameplay revolution.

Since the launch of the last instalment, Titanfall hit the shelves and changed the formula for high-octane multiplayer shooters. Its verticality and parkour offer a level of speed and traversal never seen before. Battlefield also offered a multiplayer experience on next-gen consoles previously only available on PC. Be it open terrain wars or close multiplayer action, COD is stuck between a rock and a hard place, but could come out with the best of both worlds: a single-player experience that offers vast, open battlegrounds for players to leap around and blast through and an intense, constrained multiplayer shooter.

The basic gameplay mechanics of previous games was to run down narrow pathways, killing the endless reforming enemies as they attack. Once the player crossed a certain threshold, the enemies would stop spawning, making it easier to get to the next checkpoint and/or cut-scene. Soldiers in the debut trailer are shown jumping huge distances across San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge. Such ideas – introduced thanks to the future tech – can’t be supported by corridor-driven gameplay, so the single-player campaign should take place somewhere other than the hallways of every continent.

The mech suits, drones and new ways to traverse the landscape could also fit well with Titanfall-like multiplayer maps. Activision and Sledgehammer can’t stick to its guns when Respawn and EA are using bigger artillery, and the developer certainly looks to be coming out firing. We’re yet to see the multiplayer offering, but it’s a very enticing prospect indeed.

Of course, this wouldn’t be a Call of Duty trailer without bombastic action scenes. The Golden Gate Bridge collapses, buildings explode, choppers crash to the ground and there’s a bike chase to boot. This will still, at its core, be the series you know and love: the Michael Bay movie of video games, but I really hope a sense of complexity and maturity is on-hand that goes beyond the simple crotch-grab “hoorah” story and tedious combat.

There is one more question that needs to be asked: what does this mean Black Ops? Treyarch was the team to take the first steps into ‘future war’, and Activision certainly won’t want to have two series’ narratives occurring in the same era. Considering Treyarch has been the studio to switch between time periods most frequently, it’ll be interesting to see where they go next; don’t hate me for saying I’d like to see some of the lesser-known stories from World War II…

Sledgehammer has put its best foot forward with this trailer, putting Advanced Warfare in good stead leading into E3. It’ll be interesting to see how they choose to show it off with the fully-fledged gameplay reveal (no doubt at some point during the Microsoft conference), but if the team sticks to the philosophies put forward in its debut, Sledgehammer is on to a winner.