Call of Duty 2

For the GameCube, PS2 and Xbox game, see Call of Duty 2: Big Red One.

Call of Duty 2
Developer(s)	Infinity Ward
Publisher(s)	Activision, Aspyr
Series	Call Of Duty
Engine	Modified Quake III engine + proprietary Direct3D renderer
Platform(s)	Windows, Xbox 360, Mac OS X, Mobile Phone
Release	October 25 2005 - Windows November 15, 2005 - Xbox 360 June 13, 2006 - Mac OS X
Genre(s)	First-person shooter
Mode(s)	Single player, multiplayer

Call of Duty 2 is a first-person shooter video game and sequel to the critically acclaimed game, Call of Duty, also developed by Infinity Ward. Call of Duty 2 had contributions from Pi Studios, and was published by Activision on October 25, 2005 for Windows and November 22, 2005 for the Xbox 360. Call of Duty 2 takes place during World War II and features three campaigns where the player can be a soldier for the Red Army, the British Army, or the United States Army. Since October 13 2006, the game has also been available to buy on Valve's content delivery platform, Steam. This comes after an agreement with its publisher, Activision.

Call of Duty 2 was the highest selling Xbox 360 launch title, selling 250,000 units in its first week of availability. Call of Duty 2 also was attributed to the large number of Xbox 360s sold, with 77% of people buying an Xbox 360 buying Call of Duty 2. To date, the game has sold over 1.4 million units on the console.

A single player demo featuring a British Army mission in El Daba, Egypt (entitled "The End of the Beginning") from a British perspective was released on September 26, 2005. A special DVD Collectors' Edition also exists, which includes 'making of' documentaries and interviews.

The sequel to Call of Duty 2, Call of Duty 3, was released in November 2006.

Overview

Call of Duty 2 was designed with the intent to be less linear than its predecessor, with notably more open-ended environments and fewer scripted events that were a prominent aspect in Call of Duty. For this, a new advanced AI-system was developed, called "Battle Chatter System" that consists of more than 20,000 lines of dialogue that the player's comrades and enemies use. These lines aren't activated by scripted sequences: instead, the soldiers react to the environment and use the Battle Chatter System to communicate with each other. The player will also have to cope with problems in many different ways such as flanking an enemy position. Usually fellow soldiers follow the player and thus he must advance to make his teammates advance, too.

The gameplay is also more varied. The player must take on unique tasks, such as repairing severed communication cables in the city of Stalingrad. The game features several key vehicles and fifteen new weapons.

In addition, the standard health meter in a first-person shooter was removed and replaced with a "shock" system. The new system allows the player to take a hit or two before blood seeps onto the screen. If the player manages to find cover and stay safe for a short amount of time, the player will begin to heal. The amount of hits that can be taken before blood seeps on the screen varies by difficulty level.

The game engine is based on the modified Quake III engine used in Call of Duty , with a new renderer written from scratch by Infinity Ward. This replaces the Quake 3 engine's standard OpenGL renderer with support for Direct3D 7.0 and 9.0 paths. The latter features pixel shader effects such as bump mapping, dynamic lighting and bloom.

Single Player

Mission sequence

Campaign 1 : Private Vasili Ivanovich Koslov (Red Army, 13th Guards Rifle Division) Battle of Moscow, Dec 1941 Battle of Stalingrad, Dec 1942 Battle of Stalingrad, Feb 1943 Campaign 2: Sergeant John Davis (British Army, 7th Armoured Division) Second Battle of El Alamein, Oct-Nov 1942 Tunisia Campaign, March 1943 Battle of Normandy, June 1944 Campaign 3: Tank Commander David Welsh (British Army, 7th Armoured Division) Libya, Jan 1943 Campaign 4: Corporal Bill Taylor (US Army, 2nd Ranger Battalion, Dog Company) Pointe du Hoc, June 1944 Battle of Hurtgen Forest/Hill 400, Dec 1944 Crossing the Rhine, March 1945

In the first set of missions, the player is a soldier on the Russian front, Private Vasili Ivanovich Koslov (who was first mentioned by his first name in Yuri Petrenko's letters to Natasha in Call of Duty: United Offensive). Vasili joined the Red Army for revenge; much of his family was killed by German heavy artillery. The first Russian mission is a training mission during the Battle of Moscow. Simulating the poor economy and training of the Russians at the time, the player is forced to use potatoes as practice grenades. After finishing 'training' by beating back a German assault, the player takes part in house to house fighting across Stalingrad. Battles rage from December 1942 - January 1943, at a train-yard and City Hall.

In the second set of missions, the player plays a British soldier, Sergeant John Davis of the Seventh Armoured Division. Davis is commanded by Captain Price, a popular figure from the first game. As Price was in different places and was killed on board the Tirpitz in his previous outing, it is to be assumed that the events in the second set of missions occur prior to the Tirpitz mission of Call of Duty 1. During the advance from El-Alamein to Tunisia, and the fighting at Caen in Normandy, the character must take over buildings, towns, and facilities and defend against counterattacks each time. The British campaign includes much armour as they are known as the backbone of the North African campaign. Throughout most of the missions, you will be covered with Crusader and Sherman Tanks.

An addendum to the second set of missions has the player taking on the role of a British Tank commander, David Welsh. It is only one campaign (2 levels) long, but the player takes part in the 7th Armoured Division's advance across Libya, harrying the retreating Germans.

The next set of missions are American based. As Corporal Bill Taylor of the 2nd Ranger Battalion, the player starts off by playing a part in D-Day, at the assault of Pointe du Hoc, which was located four miles west of Omaha Beach. The Americans have no more than twenty feet of beach to charge up before having to climb ropes up a cliff to sabotage artillery aimed at Utah Beach and Omaha Beach. On arriving at the top of the cliffs, the guns are discovered to be decoys, as they were during the actual war. The player then has to fight his way through German trenches and a French village to find the real set of guns. The remainder of the campaign sees the player taking part in the brutal fighting in Normandy and on Hill 400 under fire of German machine gun bunkers, artillery and Tiger tanks. Interestingly, a Panzer II is seen in Normandy even though they were almost non-existent by then.

The final mission is set amongst the Americans in Crossing the Rhine crossing into Germany. In the last scene, Sgt. Randall receives a field promotion and suggests to the Colonel that he should promote Corporal Taylor to replace the now empty Sgt. position.

The end credits depict the dramatic rescue of Capt. Price from German hands by American soldiers with much better camera angles than the "side-scroller" adventure in the original Call of Duty credits. After the credits end the words, "No cows were harmed in the making of this game" appear, as in the original Call of Duty. This is in reference to the dead cattle lying about in the Normandy missions.

Multiplayer

File:Mp44.JPG

An MP44 on the multiplayer map Carentan.

Depending on the map, players can choose between American, Soviet, British, and German forces. The players, once in the game, can also choose the weapon with which they will spawn. Also, there are several different game types. These include:

• Deathmatch: Every man for himself. Person with most kills wins.
• Team Deathmatch: Axis and Allies battle against each other. Team with most kills win.
• Capture the Flag: Players on two different teams must capture the enemy's flag while defending their own. Team with most scores win.
• Headquarters: Players must set up headquarters at one of the marked sites, and then defend it. Team that defends the HQ for the most time wins.
• Search And Destroy: The Allies attempt to set a bomb at one of two potential sites, and the Axis must defuse it within 60 seconds. If Allies set a bomb and Axis don't defuse bomb Allies win, if Allies set bomb and Axis defuses Axis wins. A team can also win if they eliminate all the players of the opposing team. Similar to the "Bomb Defusal" scenario of the PC first-person-shooter Counter-Strike.

A number of maps returned from the original Call of Duty such as:

• Carentan, France
• Brecourt, France
• Saint Mère Eglise, France (Dawnville)
• Stalingrad, USSR (Railyard)
• Rostov, USSR (Harbor), (only available on the PC versions with version 1.2 or higher, or through xbox live marketplace).

Criticism and problems

The Infinity Ward team had been blamed for incorrectly implementing the multiplayer aspect on the Xbox 360 version and received protest threats from gamers. The Xbox 360 version did not allow anyone to become a host and set up a lobby of their own. When attempting to join a game, if all servers were full, then the player automatically became a host, but had no control over map and game settings. Coupled with this, the game suffered from terrible lag rendering most games unplayable. Now you can get two new maps from the Xbox Live MarketPlace, but for others you will need Microsoft points or a code from the Call Of Duty 2 Game Of The Year Edition.

After several months and many complaints Infinity Ward stated they were working on a patch for the game that would be available over Xbox Live. Before the patch was released, a glitch was discovered which allowed players to set up their own lobbies, but required the help of another person playing a different game. The glitch allowed players to choose maps and game types (although the game types could still change randomly), but did not allow hosts to change the settings once the glitch was activated, nor restrict access to the lobby. Despite this, Call of Duty 2 still managed to remain the top most played Xbox 360 game over Xbox Live (second only to Halo 2 for the original Xbox).

Players of the PC versions originally protested against the lack of an anti-cheat system. In response to the protest, the company signed a contract with PunkBuster and have incorporated it into their patch for the game.

Patches (PC Versions)

A patch is available for Dual Core processor users that in theory speeds up the frame rate.

The 1.2 patch was then released adding Punkbuster, HTTP Redirect functionality, a welcome screen with a 'Message of the Day' functionality for multiplayer clients, improved multiplayer spawning, numerous minor bug fixes and two new multiplayer maps: Rostov, USSR (Harbor) and Wallendar, Germany. 1.2 created problems for Punkbuster with invalid GUIDs', and a game state issue that plagued servers.

A new patch, 1.3, fixed the issues with the new maps (Rostov and Wallendar), game state problems, and Punkbuster. The big problem with the Punkbuster patches are that they change players GUID's, the way that servers ban players that are cheating or acting inappropriately. This causes large ban lists to then become ineffective.

Patches (Xbox 360 Version)

The official patch was eventually made available by way of Xbox Live Update on March 22, 2006 as well as addressing all known multiplayer issues (map glitches aside), the patch also allowed users to create their own lobbies. Other changes included the ability to create private matches, post-game lobbies, and seeing enemy players' names inside of a game. The patch also changed the Headquarters multiplayer game by removing the A & B markers for potential radio sites, and reducing the countdown from 45 seconds to 15 seconds before the radios spawned in now a completely random location. The patch also corrected a flaw in the Deathmatch mode by allowing players to speak to one another whereas previous they were not able to.

The patched Xbox 360 version can support 8 players per server, whereas glitched games allowed up to 16. For this reason Infinity Ward again came under some criticism from some players for restricting the number of players after it was proven that the game could handle more. On the PC, players can join servers that support as many as 64 players.

Reaction

The PC version scores 88% on Game Rankings based on 77 reviews. The Xbox 360 version scores 90% on Game Rankings based on 85 reviews.

Call of Duty 2 received numerous perfect and near-perfect reviews from the media upon its release, as well as praise from many others. However, some reviews had minor criticisms. In general, some complained that the new health system, which allows players to regenerate health if they go under cover, makes the game less realistic than the original(Health in the original game was recovered by picking up 'Health Packs', a system felt by many to be just as unrealistic and arguably more restrictive to gameplay). Others say that while the remakes of the original game's maps were interesting, the game could have had more original maps. For the Windows version, some said that the game's performance is occasionally slow. Others, who reviewed the Xbox 360 version, complained that the multiplayer wasn't as good as it was on the PC versions because it was restricted to 8 players further hampered by severe lag which was fixed in a later auto-update.

A major criticism of the game, though, is the lack of a manual saving ability, forcing the player to rely completely on the autosave function of the game, since neither regular nor quicksaving is featured. Notable here is the level of Pointe du Hoc. The game saves once the player gets up the cliff, but the way to the next saving point is under extreme heavy fire, with the arguably hardest part just before the next saving point, forcing the player to replay the whole parcour from the start.

Players’ games can be saved at a poor time in terms of trigger events. A good example is "The Crossing Point" mission in the "Crossing the Rhine" campaign. One of the objectives call for the player to destroy a Tiger tank with either planted explosives or environmental Flak 88 artillery pieces. When the Tiger tank first makes an appearance, the first, and closest, Flak 88 is destroyed by the Tiger as a trigger event (presumably because granting the player access to this specific piece would be too easy). The resulting explosions of the destroyed Flak 88 have killed some players and they've noticed that the game has automatically saved two to three seconds prior to the explosion. Thus, the game will reload at that same point and there is not enough time to clear the area before the same resulting explosion kills the player.

Also, the lack of manual saving options prevents the player from saving before special points in the game that they would like to have readily accessible for review or replay. Additionally, when grenades were thrown NPCs on both sides could pick them up and throw them back while the player could not. Nor could the player 'cook' grenades (by holding it for a few seconds before throwing), a feature seen in the original game’s expansion pack United Offensive. Occasionally, this resulted in the player being killed when his grenades were thrown back at him with no time to react.

United Offensive had both various vehicles and bigger maps; therefore, many players thought the game was taking a step backwards when it was announced that there would be no vehicles in the game, leading to smaller maps. Activision said that they "never set out to make the best WWII FPS to date" , a statement many did not see as what a video game company's attitude should be. Some players welcomed the thought of more close-quarter combat without large distances, but others argued that this could also be achieved by creating smaller custom maps without vehicles; thus, the possibility to create both large vehicle based maps and smaller infantry maps exists. Also, seeing how EA's Battlefield 1942 (released in 2002) had a wide array of vehicles, it seemed strangely unambitious to make a game completely stripped of this aspect three years later.

In addition, the PC community felt severely let down by IW as the 1.2 patch, which added Punkbuster and Anti-Cheating software to the PC versions of the game, was delayed for months. Many gamers even boycotted the game to show their feelings towards IW's lack of care for the PC versions.

Controversy

A television advertisement for Call of Duty 2 (link) was the subject of some controversy in early 2006. The commercial, created by Los Angeles animation studio Rhythm and Hues, depicted a first-person view of events that were supposed to transpire during the game, rather than scenes from the game itself. Some consumers felt that the advertisements were misleading, and in February 2006 the United Kingdom's Advertising Standards Authority demanded that networks remove the advertisements after three consumers filed complaints of false advertising. According to ASA spokesperson Donna Mitchell, "Viewers felt that the ad was misleading because the quality of graphics was superior to that of the game's". Activision denies that the scenes were meant to give an impression of gameplay, stating in a press release shortly after the ASA banning that "The footage was intended purely to communicate the subject matter of the game rather than to represent actual gameplay."

See also

• Medal of Honor (series)

External links

• Official website
• Official Infinity Ward Community
• Official Online Tournament
• Official Trailer, Screen Shots, Developer Interview on Game Spot
• Call of Duty 2 at DMOZ
• Call of Duty HQ
• Call of Duty 2 at IMDb
• Xbox 360 Achievement List