Call of Duty Ghosts development held up by lack of final next-gen hardware

Developer Infinity Ward cannot finish work on key elements of Call of Duty: Ghosts as it is yet to receive final next-gen hardware samples.

Obviously we are in crazy early development and we will have to see how the consoles play out,” the game’s executive producer Mark Rubin told OPM. We have made some cool improvements on AI. Most of it has to do with some of the cinematic values.

We need some hardware, some finished hardware, before we can really expand.”

Reports from E3 suggest that PS4 game demos were running from Sony’s dev hardware. Many Xbox One games, however, were shown to be running off Windows 7 PCs – interestingly with Nvidia graphics hardware.

So what sort of AI enhancements is Rubin discussing?

It is subtle, really subtle,” Rubin explained. AI in general is one of those things [where] the subtle things are often easy to notice when it is bad.”

He went on to discuss what was described as situational AI”. Basically, opponents will at times react to the events around them.

They take some of the environment cues and pay attention to them,” he added. A lot of times they just kind of ignore the environment, they are just like ‘Ok this guy is supposed to be here I’m shooting, but the building is falling all over me… No, I’m still shooting you’. So sort of doing stuff like that.”