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Call of Duty: World at War screenshot

VideoGamer.com: In World at War, what will be the percentage be of American missions and Russian missions?

RF: I'd say it's a pretty even split. I can't go into exact numbers but it's pretty well balanced.

NH: I think the interesting thing will be as you play one campaign versus another you're going to be playing a very different sort of game.

VideoGamer.com: What's the latest on a release date?

NH: I don't think we're announcing that quite yet. But it will be in the Fall (autumn).

VideoGamer.com: The only other Japanese theatre of war FPS that springs to mind is Medal of Honour: Rising Sun. The consensus is that it was a poor FPS game. What did you learn from that?

RF: We learned not to make a poor FPS game.

NH: You start with a great shooter and then you build enemies and genres and stuff on top of that.

RF: The content and the quality of execution of the content is the primary concern. The rest follows. The back drop is exactly that. It's just a setting for the player. If he's not having fun, if he's not intrigued and engrossed in what he's doing then all of that doesn't matter.

NH: We dropped Modern Warfare AI into Japanese soldiers and put them in the Pacific and it didn't feel right. You don't expect the enemy to react that way, right? Well we didn't know that until we did it. We thought that we'd be able to get away with that but we realised we had to build a game specifically around that enemy, you have to build attacks around that enemy. You have to have scripted moments and moments that are AI inspired that make you feel like you're playing a different enemy or otherwise you're like 'yeah I'm fighting the same Europeans I have in many Call of Duty's, it's just happening on a different island'.

RF: Just like the consoles have evolved and the games have evolved we realised our audience evolves too. It's not always going to be the same expectation for the games and so this is why we had to reinvent things as we go along. Because if we just keep doing the same thing over and over again, while the audience is evolving we're stuck in a rut.

NH: Call of Duty has always pushed the bar of what's expected from shooters, from scripting to aiming down sights to the way you take damage, everyone takes damage like we take damage now. Modern Warfare I'm sure every game will be doing a bullet penetration, I'm sure everyone will be doing a perk system, they're great features. What we want to add to that with World at War is tactics that feel realistic, environments that are affected realistically by the weapons that you use in them. And co-op of course. We want to show people how co-op is done the Call of Duty way and that's a really high bar for us. It's just finally we have enough time to do it that way.

VideoGamer.com: You've spoken briefly about multiplayer. You said you will be adding on to what is already there. Does that mean we can expect the same modes and maps?

NH: No, no no no! What I'll say now is we recognise that Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare is great multiplayer. It's a great game but the multiplayer is stand out phenomenal. We would not want to take that engine and remove things from it. We're not going to keep any game types for instance that don't fit with our setting or we're not particularly passionate about. But the philosophy of map building, the way the perk system works, these are great foundation points. And then on top of that we've built things like area of effect perks, speciality perks that feel like they fit really well with WW2 and vehicles of course. We can't get away with delivering tight multiplayer and then turn around and deliver sloppy vehicle support. The players are expecting that. So that's what we kind of knew when we say we want to be adding to it. Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare multiplayer is a home run and we want to add on top of that.

RF: People that are used to playing Call of Duty: Modern Warfare will be able to easily slip into our multiplayer game and then go 'oh, and they also have this...'. 'And it's great too'.

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