The new Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare, futuristic-looking as it is, will not have teleportation grenades. So it was reported in a VentureBeat profile of CoD:AW studio Sledgehammer Games. Too unrealistic.
Here’s VentureBeat talking to Sledgehammer’s Michael Condrey about where they draw the line between CoD-suitable and CoD-nope:
Condrey said that the team also had to make sure that its technology of 50 years in the future had to be grounded in today’s reality of military research. Some things were totally unbelievable, so the team took it out. One example: a teleportation grenade. It could transport you instantly. But it doesn’t exist.
But they did include military realities like drones, vertical wall climbing, directed energy weapons, hover tanks, hover bikes, “smart grenades,” and heavily armoured soldiers who guard checkpoints.
Dear Sledgehammer, please reconsider. Those grenades sounded cool.
In all seriousness, this is something game designers need to always think about, right? How important is the tone of the game they’re creating and how does maintaining a consistency of that tone balance with their goals for gameplay? Does, say, the player-friendly convenience of a fast-travel system in an open-world Western outweigh its lack of realism? Does a double-jump enhance gameplay and, if so, does it need to be explained in the fiction of the game?
We can have some fun with these choices, because they sound funny on paper, but balancing tone and gameplay is a real thing a game creator has to do, especially if they’re crafting a game that they want to sell as being grounded in reality.
Below: a looping GIF from the first tease for Advanced Warfare‘s multiplayer. (The tease is at the end of the game’s newest trailer).
Comments
11 responses to “Call Of Duty Bummer: They Opted Not To Have Teleportation Grenades”
You know, Call of Duty kinda jumped the realism shark a long time ago with Modern Warfare 2, I don’t think people would bat an eye at a teleportation grenade.
I think it could be really cool, it would shake things up firefight wise… Assuming people don’t spam them. Ahh wait.. this is the CoD community.. Nvm. They wouldn’t have been cool.
This is the community that spammed Tactical Insertion flares so that they could spam Nukes!
I saw a total of 5 Nukes during my time in MW2, only 2 of them were legit and they were done by me.
Teleportation grenades, has anyone considered what could go wrong with teleportation once it starts & ends, do you know HOW MANY PEOPLE IN STAR TREK HAVE DIED because of it, I mean good choice makers of CoD:AW, you made a good choice of not including it because of the potentially grisly deaths that could result from it
It also matters if you believe teleportation kills the user and re-creates their body with a new soul and conscience that believes it’s you.
or if it works like a skip drive in Old Man’s War where you end up in a new universe mathematically similar to your own.
Oh god that’s just terrible!
Or like Doom 3 where teleportation involved a short trip to hell.
“Too unrealistic”
“Too different from the last 5 call of duty games”
“Focus groups were having fun instead of measuring their masculinity”
(yeah, I’m being mean)
I’m very good at this game