When introducing new characters into an established Call of Duty storyline, what goes into ensuring they have a chance to feel just as memorable as Soap, Price, and others within a Call of Duty campaign?
Alex Norris, Associate Design Director – I think a lot of that ties into gameplay and what you get to do with those characters. A lot of it is that we think this character is pretty awesome. They’ve got great dialogue, they’re fun, they’re enjoyable, but do I get to do anything with them on the sticks? We will try to put them next to you on the front lines.
So, whether they’re your commanding officer and they’re asking you to put everything on the line to take over an objective, or if it’s somebody that’s conscripted and just as unsure about being there as you the player, or the character that you’re acting as. We find unique ways to put them through hell.
Negus – In reimagining the Price, Soap, Ghost characters in the last three games, is what we’ve really tried to do is to make them three-dimensional, make them flawed in the right ways, and try to give them deeper stakes in terms of what they want and how they go about getting it. That same approach is applied to fully drawing these new characters. What’s really special for this process is to find exactly the right person to represent this role and then see what they bring to it. And then they influence how the character gets created and developed as well. So, we kind of go back and forth and it’s really collaborative.
How will Captain Price factor into the narrative for this newest Modern Warfare entry, and what do players need to know about his motives at the start of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4?
Negus – This is the latest game in the series, it’s new territory, a place that we’ve never really been before. We have the luxury of building on three games worth of canon. And what does that mean for characters like Price? Well, we’ve seen him do a lot of different things, involved in a lot of different types of conflict. And at the end of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III, we see Price engage in actions that he can’t really come back from. We now see a different version of Price than we’ve seen before based on the choices that we’ve seen him make in the past. And we get to forge a new path for him, and see what happens when he’s now in different conflicts – how does this version of Price resolve that conflict?
