That is an IGN opinion piece from Ryan McCaffrey, who labored at Official Xbox Journal from 2002-2012 throughout the unique Xbox and Xbox 360 period earlier than becoming a member of IGN, the place he stays “the Xbox man.” In the run-up to Xbox’s twenty fifth anniversary, he’ll be sharing his reminiscences from the platform’s first quarter-century.
Youthful readers may not keep in mind a time when Call of Duty wasn’t one of the greatest franchises in all of gaming, however I promise you that there was a time. I had performed the unique on PC — the solely platform it had been launched on — again in 2003. And, sure, I fairly appreciated it. It was a superb World Warfare 2-set army first-person shooter.
When it got here time for the sequel in 2005, which was slated to be a day-one launch title for the then-upcoming Xbox 360 console, my Official Xbox Journal colleagues and I had been enthusiastic about it, but it surely wasn’t essentially the most anticipated Xbox 360 launch recreation. (In hindsight, nothing actually was; whereas the unique Xbox had a killer app in Halo: Fight Advanced, it had little else in its launch lineup, whereas the Xbox 360 had a couple of glorious video games — like Mission Gotham Racing 3, Condemned: Prison Origins, and of course Call of Duty 2 — however no Halo-level must-haves.)
My keen however not feverish anticipation for Call of Duty 2 modified once I obtained to go to Infinity Ward in the summer time of 2005 to do a canopy story on Infinity Ward’s sequel. And I keep in mind very clearly what jumped out at my first as I used to be proven an early mission from the marketing campaign: the volumetric smoke results. With the elevated horsepower of the Xbox 360, smoke grenades mattered greater than ever throughout gameplay, as tossing them to obscure the enemy’s imaginative and prescient when you darted throughout the path close by Axis a-holes was built-in into the mission design.
It was a extremely enjoyable technique to work the Xbox 360’s new methods into the motion. Couple that with the glorious sound results and surround-sound audio work the Xbox had baked in (in equity, the unique Xbox was additionally totally 5.1-capable) and I immediately discovered myself trying ahead to Call of Duty 2 greater than some other recreation in the 360’s somewhat massive launch lineup.
Quick-forward to the fall of that yr and the imminent launch of the new Xbox. As I’ve talked about earlier than in some of my different Xbox twenty fifth anniversary look-backs at my favourite video games from the platform’s previous, magazines are made properly in advance in order to permit time for printing and transport to our a whole lot of hundreds of subscribers. This meant that we sometimes obtained entry to assessment builds of video games properly in advance (suppose: two months). This was normally no downside for builders to offer, as the submission builds they’d undergo the Xbox certification group had been sometimes fairly remaining; the age of day-one patches had not but dawned.
However in this case, I needed to go to the recreation, somewhat than the different means round, as safety was tight round each the new Xbox and the new Call of Duty. And so I returned to Infinity Ward in southern California to spend a couple of days reviewing Call of Duty 2. I started with marketing campaign earlier than shifting to multiplayer (in opposition to the Infinity Ward QA testers and multiplayer group, who had the distinct benefit of having performed dozens if not a whole lot of hours of multiplayer in comparison with my zero hours). Keep in mind earlier once I mentioned I fairly loved the unique Call of Duty on PC? Call of Duty 2’s marketing campaign on Xbox 360 was considerably higher. Extra motion, extra drama, extra pressure. It was wildly spectacular by any metric, which was particularly vital contemplating that Call of Duty multiplayer had not but established itself as the foremost cause many individuals purchased every new recreation.
Make no mistake, although: multiplayer was superior. A number of recreation modes, a brief TTK (keep in mind, it was all fairly new at the time!), killer graphics, and do not forget it was the pre-Get together Chat period when most individuals truly used the Chat Headset bundled with each Xbox 360 and communicated with their teammates. Trying again, it was the starting of the finish of Halo’s reign as the king of console shooters. Halo 2 was completely nonetheless being performed by a ton of individuals after the Xbox 360 launched (as chances are you’ll recall, Halo 1 and 2 had been the first two backwards suitable video games with Xbox 360, and that compatibility was baked into the new console out of the field), and Halo 3 would have its second two years later…proper earlier than Infinity Ward’s subsequent venture, Call of Duty 4: Fashionable Warfare, took the crown from Halo for good.
Call of Duty 2 was, fairly merely, the proper recreation at the proper time for Xbox 360. It confirmed players what the new console was succesful of whereas additionally being a stellar recreation regardless of platform. It most likely would not maintain up as we speak, truthfully, however when you had the pleasure of being there at the time, it was a heck of a second in the historical past of Xbox.
Ryan McCaffrey is IGN’s govt editor of previews and host of IGN’s weekly Xbox present, Podcast Unlocked, and a co-host of Subsequent-Gen Console Watch. He is a North Jersey man, so it is “Taylor ham,” not “pork roll.” Debate it with him on Twitter at @DMC_Ryan.