Call of Duty: Ghosts and Halo in Xbox One Reveal Event

Call of Duty: Ghosts provided the climactic ending to the Xbox One reveal event, with Eric Hirschberg (Activision CEO) introducing a video featuring interview clips with the Infinity Ward development team and a trailer.

Despite the lack of promised gameplay in the video, there were some details revealed about the game:

• Call of Duty: Ghosts DLC will be a time-limited Xbox One exclusive.
• Ghosts features a new game engine, and new characters.
• Ghosts is a collaboration with Stephen Gagham, who wrote the film Traffic, and wrote/directed Syriana
• The story features the aftermath of a massive, world-changing event. The destruction of America means that you are part of a team of underdogs, fighting against superior forces. Your allies will be the remnants of the various elite fighting forces, including an actual canine member of the squad.
• There’s a new mantle system for getting over low walls without losing momentum.
• You can now lean out around corners.
• There’s a new slide move.
• The game engine includes more impressive graphics, but also fluid dynamics, interactive smoke, and AI elements such as fish moving away from you if you enter a river.
• Multiplayer changes so far include dynamic maps, which will include floods, explosions and player-operated dynamics such as doors.

Much of the comparison during the video was made with the graphics of Modern Warfare 3, which may explain why they didn’t reference the player-operated doors in Stockpile of Call of Duty Black Ops, or the flooding in Hydro, recently released for Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 (Both developed by Treyarch).

But that was better than the scant Halo news, which was solely concerned with a new live action television series to involved Steven Spielberg as Executive Producer. Spielberg was obviously too busy to attend the event, but was beamed in to give a quick reference to how he played Pong back in the 1970s.

Non-FPS specific news was really limited to the Xbox One architecture, and the fact that currently the Xbox 360 Live service is supported by around 15,000 servers, but the plans for Xbox One are for 300,000 servers. How many of those will remain for games rather than TV apps is open to debate.