Call of Duty: Ghosts

• 1. Introduction

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  Within 24 hours of Call of Duty: Ghosts reaching stores in November 2013, Activision had shipped $1 billion worth of copies to retailers. The publisher still counted the game as a letdown. Ghosts was the tenth major Call of Duty release and the sixth made by the studio Infinity Ward. It broke away from the World War II, Black Ops and Modern Warfare strands that came before it and set its war in the near future. Why did a launch of that size fall short of expectations? What was a German Shepherd doing as a playable hero? And how did a squad of ten customizable characters, a fight against ancient alien creatures and a campaign that ends on a cliffhanger fit into one shooter?

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• 2. A Divided Continent

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  A conflict in the Middle East sets the whole story in motion. It destroyed several oil fields and left the world short of energy. Several oil-producing countries in South America reacted by forming the Federation of the Americas, a military dictatorship. It annexed the rest of its continent, then invaded Central America, the Caribbean and Mexico.

  The campaign proper opens in 2018. U.S. Army Captain Elias Walker, played by Stephen Lang, tells his teenage sons about the legend of the Ghosts. The sons are Logan and David, known as Hesh, played by Brandon Routh. The Ghosts are a coalition of all U.S. Special Operations Forces units, and they first appeared during the Middle East conflict.

  Meanwhile, in space, the Federation hijacks the Orbital Defense Initiative, or ODIN. It is an American network of satellite weapons that attack by kinetic bombardment. The Federation uses it to destroy cities in the southwestern United States. U.S. Air Force astronauts Captain Baker and Mosley sacrifice themselves to destroy the station and stop more payloads from falling. The Walker family narrowly escapes the destruction of San Diego.

  Ten years later, the war has settled into a bloody stalemate along the ruined cities and the old border with Mexico, now called "No Man's Land". The Federation tries to break the frontlines, but the U.S. holds its ground, and the fighting becomes a war of attrition. In 2028, Hesh and Logan enlist in a special Army unit commanded by their father.

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• 3. The Ghosts Campaign

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  Riley, a German Shepherd, is the first non-human playable character in the Call of Duty franchise. The dog serves alongside the Walker brothers and shares the campaign with several human characters. Most of the story is told through the eyes of Logan Walker. Players also step into the boots of Baker, an astronaut specialist, of Sergeant Thompson, and of Elias Walker himself.

  On a mission into No Man's Land, the brothers watch Federation agent Gabriel Rorke, played by Kevin Gage, interrogate a Ghost operative named Ajax. They team up with Thomas Merrick, played by Jeffrey Pierce, and Keegan Russ, played by Brian Bloom, to rescue him. Ajax is killed anyway. In Santa Monica, California, where U.S. forces are holding out against a Federation assault, Elias reveals that he leads the Ghosts. He recruits his sons and tells them why Rorke hunts the team.

  The reason goes back to 2016, when General Diego Almagro ordered every U.S.-born citizen in Federation territory imprisoned or executed. Rorke convinced the U.S. government to send the Ghosts to assassinate Almagro in Caracas. They succeeded, but Elias had to abandon Rorke to save himself and his squad. The Federation captured Rorke and used torture and hallucinogens to turn him into one of its commanders.

  In the present, the Ghosts return to Caracas to press Victor Ramos, head of the Federation's research and development, for Rorke's location. They capture Rorke at his base in the Gulf of Mexico, but Federation forces rescue him by destroying their plane. The trail leads through a base in the Andes, where they learn of a new superweapon. The Ghosts then destroy the Atlas oil platform in the Drake Passage and sink a destroyer guarding a factory in Rio de Janeiro. Inside the factory, they discover that the Federation has reverse-engineered ODIN into its own orbital weapon, LOKI.

  A safe house in Las Vegas becomes the turning point. Rorke captures the team there and executes Elias before the others escape. The U.S. military then throws all its remaining forces into an assault on the LOKI space station. Hesh and Logan fire a missile at the Federation space center in the Atacama Desert, and American troops seize LOKI and turn it on the Federation military. The brothers disobey Merrick's orders and chase Rorke to avenge their father. Logan shoots him and rescues Hesh from drowning, but Rorke survives and captures Logan, planning to brainwash him. A post-credits scene shows Logan in a caged pit in the jungle, presumably enduring the same torture that remade Rorke.

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• 4. Multiplayer Overhaul

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  The KEM Strike is a nuke-like kill streak reward, and it was one of several additions that reshaped Ghosts multiplayer. Maps now contain areas that can be altered or destroyed. Players can earn the ODIN kill streak by reaching a certain number of kills. They can also earn it by killing the top player on the enemy team and then completing challenges after picking up a blue briefcase that drops.

  Sniper rifle scopes gained "dual render technology", which lets a zoomed-in player see around the edge of the scope, though blurred. The game also features playable female soldiers. Ghosts was the first Call of Duty game with sliding, leaning and animations for interacting with the environment.

  Team Deathmatch, Kill Confirmed, Search and Destroy, Domination and Free For All all return as staples. The new modes are stranger. In Cranked, a player who scores a kill becomes "Cranked" and has 30 seconds to score another. Anyone who misses that window blows up.

  Blitz resembles Capture the Flag. Players must reach a portal at the enemy spawn point while stopping the other team from reaching theirs. A captured portal closes for 10 seconds so that nobody can simply rush it. Infected, borrowed from Modern Warfare 3, starts with one random player infected, who spreads the infection until all survivors fall or time runs out. The Xbox One, PlayStation 4 and PC versions also offered Ground War, a bigger version of Domination and Team Deathmatch with more players. Gun Game arrived in a later update.

  Squads is a separate game type built around ten different customizable characters. It can be played alone or with other players, including friends. The modes are Squad Assault, Safeguard, Safeguard Infinite, Squad vs Squad and Wargame, all involving AI-controlled enemies and squad mates. Every one of them can be played online or offline.

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• 5. Extinction

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  Cryptids are the alien creatures that Extinction pits up to four players against in a base-defending survival map. The mode serves as a spiritual successor to the Zombies co-operative mode, which first appeared in Call of Duty: World at War. The usual goal is to destroy every Cryptid hive on the map. Awakening instead asks players to scan for obelisks that must be destroyed, and Exodus has generators to activate. Players pick one of four classes with unique traits and customizable loadouts. Leveling a class earns more weapons and equipment, and the mode becomes available after finishing the first level of the campaign.

  The first map, "Point of Contact", ships with the base game and takes place in an abandoned city in Colorado. According to the story, a stray missile struck Caldera Peak, Colorado, and exposed a colony of dormant Cryptids. Their masters, the Ancestors, ordered them awake to destroy the town. A task force code-named Spectre exterminated the outbreak, yet the Nightfall Program collected the remains for research.

  The second map is "Nightfall", set in an Alaskan research facility 14 weeks later. It arrived in the Onslaught pack and brings in Captain David Archer, a former British SAS captain who started the program, and Dr. Samantha Cross. It also adds a boss-type enemy called the Breeder and a mysterious weapon, the Venom X. Cross fell under the Ancestors' influence and became a hypnotic spy with telepathic abilities. She caused an outbreak that killed everyone at the facility except herself and Archer.

  In "Mayday", from the Devastation pack, the action moves onto a Naval ship 26 days after "Nightfall". Archer uses Cross as a beacon to find the remaining Cryptid Arks, and she summons the Kraken, a large multi-tentacled boss. Players can find schematics to build powerful weapons, including four variations of the Venom X. The third pack, Invasion, adds "Awakening", an underground Cryptid hive 36 hours later. It brings the flying Gargoyle, the explosive Bomber and the powerful Mammoth, and players can use ARK attachments that turn weapons into lasers.

  The final map, "Exodus", arrived in the Nemesis pack and takes place three months after "Awakening" at a launch facility. General "Godfather" Castle orders the elite squad CIF Team One to protect the site so that the survivors can flee Earth. Nearly every Cryptid type appears, including the Ancestors themselves. Taking them down requires two new weapons, the NX-1 Disruptor and the NX-1 Grenades. In the story, Cross says the team must sacrifice itself to activate the Medusa, a psionic weapon that destroys every Cryptid within a three-mile radius.

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• 6. Engine and Frame Rate

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  On the 7th of February 2013, Activision confirmed that a new Call of Duty game was in development for release in the fourth quarter of that year. The publisher expected to sell fewer copies than Black Ops II on the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360. The reason was the approaching shift to a new console generation. Ghosts was designed to start a new subseries timed with the eighth generation arriving from Sony and Microsoft.

  The engine caused some confusion. Infinity Ward first described it as new, but it was later clarified to be the previous engine with significant upgrades. The game also used Umbra 3, a rendering tool from Umbra Software. It speeds up large environments through occlusion culling, a method that filters out hidden objects so they are not drawn.

  Infinity Ward chose frame rate over display resolution, aiming for 60 frames per second on every platform. The result was a gap between the new consoles. The PlayStation 4 version outputs at 1080p, although a "configuration issue" meant it still needed a release day patch to get there. The Xbox One manages only 720p while holding the frame rate. The Wii U version was developed by Treyarch. David Buckley wrote the original score.

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• 7. Reveal and Release

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  A social media mosaic appeared on the official Call of Duty website on the 29th of April 2013, filling in each time a user logged in through Twitter or Facebook. By the next day it was complete, showing a skull and the text "the Ghosts are real." Details had already leaked. The retailer Tesco pulled a PlayStation 3 listing that went up accidentally, and Target also listed the game for PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360.

  The live-action teaser trailer "Masked Warriors" came out on the 1st of May 2013. It shows glimpses of people wearing historical battle masks, including soldiers putting on the skull mask from the box art. Ghosts appeared at the "Xbox Reveal" event on the 21st of May 2013. At E3 2013, the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One versions were promoted, and the Wii U version was confirmed near the end of the event on the 13th of June. On the 14th of August 2013, the multiplayer trailer premiered "Survival" by Eminem, featuring Liz Rodrigues and produced by DJ Khalil. The song also serves as the game's credit song.

  The game reached Windows, PlayStation 3, Wii U and Xbox 360 on the 5th of November 2013. The PlayStation 4 version followed on the 15th of November and the Xbox One version on the 22nd of November. Some retailers still made the PlayStation 4 version available early.

  Pre-orders carried a bonus map called "Free Fall" and made Simon "Ghost" Riley and John "Soap" MacTavish from Modern Warfare 2 playable. The Wii U pre-order lacked "Free Fall" until the 4th of March 2014. Four map packs followed in 2014, all covered by a Season Pass. Onslaught led on the 28th of January for Xbox and the 27th of February for PlayStation and Windows. Its map Ignition remakes Scrapyard from Modern Warfare 2, and on Fog, Michael Myers from the Halloween films became a playable character. Devastation added Predator on the map Ruins and Unearthed, a remake of Dome from Modern Warfare 3. Invasion brought back Favela from Modern Warfare 2, and Nemesis closed the run with "Showtime", a reimagined "Shipment" from Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare. Announcer packs from Snoop Dogg and from R. Lee Ermey, the Drill Instructor of Full Metal Jacket, rounded out the extras.

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• 8. Reception and Legacy

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  Metacritic recorded both "mixed or average" and "generally favorable" reviews for Call of Duty: Ghosts. IGN praised "sweeping changes that breathe new life into the multiplayer experience" and called the campaign "lengthy, challenging, and varied". GameSpot went further, calling the campaign "impressive" and "a terrific collection of shootouts and set pieces". Both welcomed the new customization and game types. Extinction drew the warmest words, including "tremendous fun".

  Other critics were cooler. PC Gamer called the campaign "exciting but only passively entertaining" and disliked the "whack-a-mole" feel of multiplayer. VideoGamer.com found the overall gameplay more refined than Black Ops 2 but called the campaign a "po-faced, nonsensical rehash of greatest hits long past". Eurogamer said the campaign "can't help but feel like a step backwards", though still "devilishly entertaining". Joystiq was harshest, describing "a fresh coat of paint over a tired design document".

  Sales told a similar story. Overall sales fell below those of 2012's Black Ops II, and Activision blamed uncertainty over the coming console generation. As of February 2014, the game had sold over 19 million copies in physical retail.

  Later assessments have been mostly negative, and the game ranks low in lists of the series. Seth Parmer of TheGamer called it "underwhelming", and NME's staff said the same of the multiplayer. Dan Wenerowicz of Complex argued that Ghosts marked the end of the series' "Golden Age". Chris Freiberg of Den of Geek disagreed, praising the campaign as one of the series' best and saying that "in hindsight it made a lot of daring changes that have actually aged pretty well". The science fiction setting did return in Advanced Warfare and Infinite Warfare. Ghosts was the last Call of Duty game on a Nintendo system until Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 reached the Nintendo Switch 2 in 2026.

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