Call of Duty: WWII

• 1. Introduction

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  Call of Duty: WWII earned more than 500 million US dollars in the first three days it was on sale. Sledgehammer Games developed the shooter and Activision published it. It reached PlayStation 4, Windows and Xbox One players on the 3rd of November 2017. That opening weekend was a huge result for a studio that had spent its previous project on futuristic soldiers. So why did a series known for modern and near-future warfare go back to the 1940s? What did the developers choose to show, and what did they leave out? How did players, critics and one tragic episode online shape the game's reputation afterward? This documentary follows those questions from the studio's first doubts to the arguments that outlasted the launch.

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• 2. Return To 1944

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  Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare, released in 2014, gave Sledgehammer Games double jumps and futuristic gear, and it also left the studio asking what came next. Michael Condrey, a co-founder and studio head, told Metro that some of his favorite entertainment was set in World War II. He named Band of Brothers as a personal passion. Condrey called it "a great hero's war, kind of the last that was recognized as a noble cause in a war." He also admitted that building a World War II game after such a movement-heavy title was a tougher question than any he had tackled.

  The answer arrived as the fourteenth main installment of the series. It was the first set mainly in World War II since Call of Duty: World at War in 2008. It was also Sledgehammer's second Call of Duty, and the fourth to follow Activision's three-year development cycle, which gives each game more time. Advanced Warfare was the first on that cycle. The game runs on an upgraded version of the studio's own engine from that earlier title.

  The studio then faced a harder choice about what a war story could leave out. Activision at first declined to deny rumors that Nazi extermination camps would appear. Adam Rosenberg of Mashable argued that war games had tended to behave like "Holocaust deniers" by avoiding the subject for business reasons. Senior creative director Bret Robbins said some very dark things happened in the conflict and ignoring them felt wrong. "We absolutely show atrocities," he said. "People are ready for it. They want it." The campaign, however, stayed on the Allied side. When asked on Twitter, Sledgehammer confirmed that players would not control Axis soldiers in the story.

  Raven Software handled the Windows version. Its chief technology officer, Dwight Luetscher, said the team aimed to respond to that community's needs. The PC edition removed controller aim assist and added a sensitivity slider for aiming down sights. Raven would soon take a second role in the multiplayer design.

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• 3. Boots On The Ground

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  Wall running and double jumping had marked the two previous Call of Duty games, and WWII dropped both. The developers called the result "boots on the ground" play, which means combat that stays on the ground and out of the air. Unlimited sprint remained from the previous two titles. The slide was replaced by a "hit-the-deck" move, which lets a player throw themselves forward and flatten against the earth to reach cover. It resembles the "dolphin dive" that Treyarch used in Call of Duty: Black Ops and Black Ops II.

  The campaign made an even sharper break from habit. Health no longer regenerated by itself, something the series had not done since the original game and Call of Duty 2: Big Red One. Players had to find health packs in the levels or get them from a medic squadmate. Other squadmates handed over ammunition and grenades, called in mortar strikes, or marked enemies as silhouettes. None of these supplies came back on their own.

  The campaign also added smaller actions. In certain sections the player can capture enemy soldiers or drag wounded allies to cover. Some parts of the campaign hand over control of vehicles. All of these tools serve one soldier, a private named Ronald "Red" Daniels.

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• 4. Daniels And His Platoon

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  On the 6th of June 1944, Private First Class Ronald "Red" Daniels of the 16th Infantry Regiment, 1st Infantry Division, storms Omaha Beach with his platoon. Beside him are PFC Robert Zussman, Technician Fifth Grade Frank Aiello and Private Drew Stiles. Their leaders are First Lieutenant Joseph Turner and Technical Sergeant William Pierson, who is abrasive and drinks heavily. Zussman is stabbed by a German soldier during the landing, and Daniels drags him to safety.

  On the 25th and the 26th of July, the platoon supports the 745th Tank Battalion in Operation Cobra and helps liberate the town of Marigny. There Daniels hears that Pierson was demoted after leading men recklessly to their deaths at the Battle of Kasserine Pass. In August, Colonel Davis sends the platoon with two British Special Operations Executive officers, Arthur Crowley and Vivian Harris, to destroy a German armored train carrying V-2 rockets. French resistance member Camille "Rousseau" Denis joins them. On the 25th of August in Paris, she places explosives at a German garrison entrance and kills Gestapo officer Heinrich after he sees through her identity. The platoon then liberates the city.

  Aachen, on the 18th of October, brings a harder moral test. After the platoon takes a hotel, it finds civilians sheltering in the basement. Turner orders them evacuated over Pierson's objections. Daniels rescues a young girl named Anna, but German soldiers fire on the truck carrying the civilians and kill her older sister, Erica. Pierson had sent the truck away without protection.

  On the 14th of November, at Hill 493 in the Battle of Hürtgen Forest, Pierson orders an early attack that drags Turner's squad in. A Tiger II tank attacks the platoon, and Daniels is injured destroying it. Turner covers the escape and dies. Pierson takes command and promotes Daniels to corporal.

  Christmas Day brings the Battle of the Bulge. The platoon is surrounded, and African-American combat engineer Marcus Howard helps it contact air support. The player then flies as Second Lieutenant Matthew Weber in a P-47 Thunderbolt of the 509th Fighter Squadron. Two days later, a German prisoner reveals a plan to destroy the last bridge over the Rhine at Remagen. The platoon's attack on a nearby air base fails, and Zussman is captured. Daniels disobeys Pierson to chase the truck carrying him, is wounded, and is dismissed from the platoon.

  Daniels receives a Bronze Star for the intelligence and a chance to go home to his pregnant wife. He refuses, since he still wants to save Zussman. Davis then tells him the truth about Pierson: he was demoted for disobeying an order to retreat while trying to rescue part of his own platoon. Pierson admits it, and Daniels rejoins the platoon.

  On the 7th of March 1945, the platoon captures the last Rhine bridge and pushes into Germany. At the Berga concentration camp they find only emptiness, because survivors have been sent on a death march. Daniels finds Zussman and saves him. Afterward Daniels returns to Texas, where his wife and newborn son wait. He visits the grave of his older brother Paul, who died in childhood after a wolf attack that Daniels failed to prevent, and he lays his medal on the tombstone.

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• 5. Divisions And Headquarters

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  E3 2017, held from the 13th to the 15th of June, was where Sledgehammer revealed the multiplayer mode. Instead of the series' familiar create-a-class system, players picked a Division. There were five at first: Infantry, Airborne, Armored, Mountain and Expeditionary. Each came with its own basic combat training, division training and weapon skills. Players advanced through ranks in a division to earn extra perks, alongside a global perk system called Basic Training. Resistance, Cavalry and Commando followed during 2018, and an April 2018 overhaul addressed balancing problems.

  The social space called Headquarters sits on Omaha Beach in Normandy, three days after the invasion, when the Allies have turned the captured sand into a base. Up to 48 players can gather there. They can watch others open loot boxes, practice at a firing range, test scorestreaks in a field, or fight one-on-one duels while spectators watch. Sledgehammer later turned the hub into a playable map named HQ for several party modes.

  The end-of-match highlight also changed. A "Bronze Star" killcam shows the kills judged most impressive, measured by the most points gained in a row. Search & Destroy is the exception and keeps its final killcam of the round's last kill.

  War, a new mode built with Raven Software, is the most ambitious addition. Two teams of six play objectives as Allies or Axis, drawing on famous battles. One example has the Allies storming Normandy on D-Day while the Axis defend the bunker on a map called Operation Neptune. Team Deathmatch, Domination and Hardpoint returned, along with Gridiron, a ground-bound take on Uplink, a mode Sledgehammer introduced in Advanced Warfare.

  Four paid map packs carried the game through 2018. The Resistance came first, on the 30th of January 2018, with the maps Anthropoid, Valkyrie and Occupation. The War Machine, United Front and Shadow War followed, and Shadow War reached PlayStation 4 on the 28th of August 2018. Each pack added multiplayer maps, a War map and Zombies maps. Season Pass buyers also received Carentan, a remake of a multiplayer map from Call of Duty and Call of Duty 2.

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• 6. Nazi Zombies

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  The name Nazi Zombies traces back to the first version of the mode, in Treyarch's Call of Duty: World at War. In WWII, Sledgehammer gave the co-operative mode its own alternate-history story, separate from the campaign. The Third Reich, in the last stages of the war, makes a desperate attempt to turn the tide by creating an undead army. Condrey said the story drew on some "real events" despite its science-fiction frame. He also compared the experience to Dead Space, a third-person horror game that he and Glen Schofield directed at EA Redwood Shores.

  The mode keeps the wave-based survival formula of earlier Zombies games and adds a class system with four roles: Offense, Control, Medic and Support. Loadouts include equippable Raven Mods, which work like multiplayer perks. Sledgehammer also tried to give popular mechanics, such as weapon wallbuys and currencies, realistic explanations within the mode's lore. A hint system points players toward parts of the main story quest.

  Creative director Cameron Dayton described two routes through that quest. A "casual path" lets newer players progress through the story. A "hardcore" path, which counts as the official canon, hides objectives and tells more of the story. On the 29th of May, the Zombies map Gröesten Haus also became a playable map for zombie-themed modes in multiplayer, as part of the Attack of the Undead event.

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• 7. Contested Uniforms

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  "We also make a distinction between the SS and the German regular army," said Glen Schofield, co-studio head at Sledgehammer. In online matches, players are randomly assigned to Allies or Axis, so that distinction mattered. Schofield said Germans still separate their military from the Nazis, and the developers wanted to show soldiers doing their duty. Jörg Friedrich, a developer of Through the Darkest of Times, criticized the choice for promoting the "myth of the clean Wehrmacht." That myth is the false claim that regular forces, unlike the Waffen-SS, took no part in war crimes or the Holocaust.

  Other critics went further. They argued that separating Wehrmacht soldiers from the Nazi party means little when the army's actions advanced the party's genocidal aims. They also warned that playing as these factions gradually numbs audiences and normalizes an abhorrent group.

  Symbols caused a separate dispute before release. Swastikas were mostly absent, and the multiplayer included a variety of playable German soldiers. At E3 2017, Condrey said Nazi symbols would bring no honor without the rich history of a World War II story to give them context. He added that multiplayer is a shared, global experience that had to follow local laws, a reference to German censorship rules. The campaign, he said, would include swastikas to be historically accurate.

  Condrey also acknowledged complaints that black and female German soldiers were historically inaccurate, since Nazi Germany never recruited such soldiers. He wanted a diverse audience to see itself in the game. "This is about you," he said, arguing that players should be able to choose a hero who represents who they are.

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• 8. Reception And Aftermath

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  On Metacritic, Call of Duty: WWII earned "generally favorable" reviews on PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, while the PC version drew "mixed or average" ones. Miguel Concepcion of GameSpot gave a 9/10 and called the campaign "moving." Nick Plessas of EGMNow gave 8.5/10, and he liked that missing health regeneration forced strategic positioning and resource management. Miranda Sanchez of IGN gave 8/10, praising a "more human perspective" while criticizing some action sequences for clashing with the serious tone. She named Zombies the standout mode.

  Daniel Tack of Game Informer gave 8.75/10 and called multiplayer the "shining star," praising War mode. He found the campaign tedious, thanks to "standard gunplay and endless killing fields." Jason Faulkner of GameRevolution thought the beach landing had a "been there done that" feel, yet he still counted some missions among the best in the series. Russ Frushtick of Polygon called multiplayer "strong and enjoyable" but described campaign missions as déjà vu. Jeff Gerstmann of Giant Bomb was harshest, calling the characters "lifeless and generic" and the game the most "by-the-numbers" Call of Duty yet.

  Recognition came anyway. Eurogamer ranked the game 38th on its Top 50 of 2017, and EGMNow placed it 20th among the year's best 25. IGN nominated it for Best Shooter, Best Graphics, Best Multiplayer and Best Spectator Game. The long awards list also included a D.I.C.E. Award nomination for Action Game of the Year. A Game Audio Network Guild nomination covered an instrumental piece titled "A Brotherhood of Heroes."

  On the 20th of December 2017, Activision announced more than 1 billion US dollars in worldwide revenue. That made it the highest-grossing console game of the year in North America and the second highest in the United Kingdom. By the end of the year it had over 20.7 million players: 12.1 million on PlayStation 4-7.8 million on Xbox One and 825,000 on Steam. In Japan, the PlayStation 4 version sold 168,234 copies in its first week and topped that week's sales chart.

  Soon after release, a fatal incident tied to the game unfolded far from any screen. Casey Viner of Ohio was angry after friendly fire ruined an online tournament match with a $1.50 wager. He threatened to swat his teammate, Shane Gaskill of Wichita. Gaskill posted his previous home address in McCormick and challenged Viner to go ahead. Viner contacted Tyler Barriss of Los Angeles, who phoned the Wichita Police Department claiming to have murdered his father and taken family hostage. Officers arrived at the address, which 28-year-old Andrew Finch now occupied. Officer Justin Rapp shot and killed Finch, saying he believed Finch reached for his waistband.

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