Infinity Ward executive producer for Call of Duty: Ghosts Mark Rubin had a fair amount of things to say about the player customization options within this game. Ghosts marks the first time that players will be able to truly build their characters from scratch, with different genders, skin tones, races and more to truly represent themselves in the game.
“With player customization, we felt we were missing this ability to tie you in as a player, as a person, to the character you were playing. I didn’t even start with player customization so much as customization. There was a time when it was just gonna be weapon customization or new model customization. We specially felt like…with a lot of our fans…we have so many fans who aren’t even gamers…some one’s gotta come up with this, a new genre of ‘person’?
“A gamer to me is some one who player video games, loves games, knows things about all kinds of games. And a lot of Call of Duty players, they’re…they don’t play games. They only play Call of Duty. Sports guys too. We had a baseball guy here, not too long ago and I asked ‘What kind of games do you play?’ to which he said, ‘Oh I don’t play any games, I play Call of Duty and I play a golf game and that’s it.’
“Hardcore players, like really hardcore players, competitive players are there for the competitive hardcore nature of it. They have something they grasp on to. The casual players, like I said, they play the game, and we wanted an investment for them and character customization seemed to be one of those things which maybe those casual players would latch on to more.
“When we went to do character customization, we didn’t think ‘Finally! We’ll be able to get the girls in the game and they’ll play!’ It was ‘Now we can make characters that represent us’ and ‘us’ was multiple races, multiple genders…it wasn’t a gimmicky thing of adding females. It was an inclusive thing. It was to make sure that we got all our fans, as much as possible, included into the process, into the characters.
When asked if there was an RPG bent to the whole thing, Rubin stated that, “It was definitely about creating an avatar. That’s what you do in MMOs, you create an avatar and you care about that avatar so it’s definitely an aspect of that. A lot of guys who started…a lot of guys who were on COD4 for instance were heavy MMO players too. And I remember we used to have this thing where we would always go and play the weirdest, craziest MMOs we could find. Whatever it was, whatever came out at the time…even some of the Korean ones. And then we’d go play it and be like ‘Okay, you see that thing? The way they handled their inventory was interesting’ and basically found ideas through studying MMOs a lot.”
Call of Duty: Ghosts is slated to release on November 5th for Xbox 360, PC, Wii U and PS3, and will also launch with the Xbox One and PS4 on their respective dates.
Source: Game Informer
