In Call of Duty 3, D-Day's come and gone, and the focus shifts to the 1944 Normandy Breakout, approximately 44 days of desperate fighting that lead up to the liberation of Paris. It was a complex, intricate operation that required American, British, Canadian and Polish troops to act in concert to bust through dense clusters of imposing fortifications. D-Day may have been over, but the struggle had hardly begun.
Lead designer Jeremy Luyties explained that storytelling will receive a much greater focus in Call of Duty 3. He described the game as a "seamless cinematic storytelling experience" and advised players to watch the cutscenes if they wanted the greatest effect. The cutscenes will also help to mask the load times, which is the major trick behind the seamless action that Luyties evangelized. While I wasn't able to ascertain much about the storytelling during my play time, I can certainly tell you about the meat of the game: the action.
Solo Ops
The first demo level in the Xbox 360 version was called The Island, and it started with a small squad of troops advancing into enemy territory while using a tank for cover. Hostilities broke out almost immediately, and the tank stalled as the allies scurried for safety. One thing I noticed pretty quickly was that the fire fight was longer and more involved than I might have expected; indeed, many players died once or twice trying to clear it. This may be partially due to better AI, but there also just seemed to be a lot of enemy troops. I would notice this repeatedly as I played.
This is no coincidence, as the game engine seems able to display noticeably more enemies and allies than before. What's more striking, however, is the increased graphical fidelity. For all its good looks, the Xbox 360 version of Call of Duty 2 was just a PC port. Treyarch suggests that Call of Duty 3 is built from the ground up to take advantage of the graphical capabilities of the 360 and PS3, and while that makes me wonder about the Wii, PS2 and Xbox versions (the latter two of which were not shown to us), it's certainly easy to see the large leap in graphical fidelity in the 360 and PS3 versions. The game tries and often succeeds in maintaining a super-smooth 60 frames per second, and the texture detail and shader effects are among the best I've seen in a console game.
