When Infinity Ward looked at Call of Duty: Ghosts and what it could do to push the franchise forward, there was always a catch. Whatever new technology was being added had to still function on current-generation hardware – minus the greater graphical fidelity. That doesn’t mean the changes will be minimal, as expanded squad AI and destructible environments should push the series forward, but the Xbox One and PS4 versions of that game won’t be that different from what’s seen on the old boxes.
"It's the same on both platforms," Rubin told OXM. "We didn't want to nerf one to make the other. This is actually a sort of general comment on tech, but what we did is every feature tech-wise that we wanted to do, we set out with the idea of making it awesome for next gen, and we would do that and go 'can we somehow manage to get this done on current gen as well?'
"And in a lot of cases we were able to work with the systems, and get it working on current gen. Some things we definitely couldn't, graphics being the most obvious – things like the tessellation stuff, the subdivision rendering and the displacement mapping. All of that stuff definitely can't go on current gen, but most of the features – the audio engine, the squad AI – we were able to get on current gen."
If you’d like to see the game in action, a full multiplayer match of Ghosts was recently released online. It’s still similar to what we’ve been playing for years, but Infinity Ward seems to be doing its best to move forward without leaving all its original platforms in the dust.