As far as the Theater Mode, do you have to tag a match to be recorded before you start it? Or is every online match being recorded?
Yes, great question. Here’s how that works. So, every game that you play, is saved in what we call my recent games. So you can go back, there’s a to-be-determined specific amount of time that we keep recent games. It won’t be something that you played 10 years ago.
But if you played it pretty recently, it will be there. And then you can take that game and you can save it to your file share, where it’s saved forever. Because at that point it’s your own kind of online personal hard drive thing.
(More on Techland: Video Editing Coming to Call of Duty: Black Ops?)
So, once you save it over there, so, when you get done with the game, the after action report will come up, you can head over, take the recent games, save it to your clip. Save it to your file share, excuse me, it was a really good game. Yeah. They’re all there. The worlds largest hard drives. When they’re in your file share, anybody on your friend’s list can come view them. Take them. Watch them. And save them to their file share if they want. They can edit, too. If you have the raw game in your file share, then they can take it and make their own version of the clip.
That’s very open-source in a way…
Yeah. Here’s how we think about it. A game is actually considered a film. A film is completely raw. It’s the entire game. You can watch it from anyone’s view. In first person. In third person. In free camera. You can change to any player at any point in time.
So you can see the game from any perspective, at any point. It’s insane actually. We can watch the whole game, and once you start editing those things, and you publish it as a clip, then people who watch your clip, see the way you made it.
So the film is the raw thing, that’s the game. The clip is something that you edited together. And when people watch your clip, they’re watching what you wanted them to see. That’s the distinction between a film and a clip.
There’s a lot of Call of Duty fans. There’s a lot of people playing the game. They are very different people. They like different things. We need to make sure that this game is broad, and we got this stuff. And then they’ll find each other and they can have fun. It sucks to think that there are people who would play the game and not be able to have fun with it. So we want to find ways for those people to have fun.
You talk about people playing and not being able to have fun and it seems like the Combat Training is trying to account for that. Can you talk a little bit about the practice dummies and the “Larry” AI and how that came about? And what specifically were you aiming for in terms of making it human-like?
Well, the first battle we had to fight was getting him to aim normally. Players have delay in their behavior. You might spot somebody in the corner of your eye, but you’re not a robot. You don’t go bam! and snap to the guy. And then bam! with your ADS, and then bam!, shooting him through the wall because you know exactly where he is.
So it was a lot of work. This thing was not much more than a development tool. He was quite literally…Larry was nothing. He was just a guy who stood there. And when you hit him he’d be like, you did 10 points of damage. You did 20 points of damage.
And we were using it as a gun-tuning tool. But it became really important to get Larry to move, and then get Larry to aim naturally, and to track well, and then it just got out of control. It started as this very simple thing and then pretty soon he’s stealing your care package crates. So he’s a practice dummy. He’s meant to help new players. He won’t solve world hunger.