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Call of Duty 2

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For the Gamecube, PS2 and Xbox game, see Call of Duty 2: Big Red One.
Call of Duty 2
Box art for the PC version.
Developer(s)Infinity Ward
Publisher(s)Activision, Aspyr
EngineInfinity Ward's property engine
Platform(s)Windows, Xbox 360, Mac OS X
ReleaseOctober 25, 2005 - PC
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. It was developed by Infinity Ward, with contributions from Pi Studios, and was published by Activision on October 25, 2005 for the PC 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.

Call of Duty 2 was the highest selling Xbox 360 launch title, selling 250,000 units in its first week of availability.[1] 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, an impressive number contributing to an average of 4 games for every Xbox 360 sold. [1] To date the game has sold over 1.4 million units on the console. [2]

A single player demo featuring a 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.

Overview

Call of Duty 2 was designed with the intent to be less linear than its predecessor, with notably more open-ended environments and less 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 your 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, instead of having the AI-controlled characters communicate to each other via a form of telepathy. 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 fellows advance, too.

The gameplay is also more varied. The player has to take on unique tasks, such as repairing severed communication cables in the city of Stalingrad. 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 approximately 5 seconds, the soldier will then become fully healed. This is not as easy as it sounds with (automatic) fire coming from many directions, and especially in harder difficulties, deaths are frequent.

The game engine is built from scratch and supports bump mapping and dynamic lighting. It features a filter to produce realistic lighting, leading to special tactical gameplay elements, such as making it difficult to shoot enemies on a rooftop because of bright light.

The game features several key vehicles and fifteen new weapons.

Single Player

Mission sequence
  • Campaign 1 :

-Private Vasili Ivanovich Koslov (Red Army, 13th Guards Rifle Division.

  1. Battle of Moscow, Dec 1941
  2. Battle of Stalingrad, Dec 1942
  3. Battle of Stalingrad, Feb 1943
  • Campaign 2:

-Sergeant John Davis (British Army, 7th Armoured Division)

  1. Second Battle of El Alamein, Oct-Nov 1942
  2. Tunisia Campaign, March 1943
  3. Battle of Normandy, June 1944
  • Campaign 3:

-Tank Commander David Welsh (British Army, 7th Armoured Division)

  1. Libya, Jan 1943
  • Campaign 4:

-Corporal Bill Taylor (US Army, 2nd Ranger Battalion)

  1. Pointe du Hoc, June 1944
  2. Battle of Hurtgen Forest/Hill 400, Dec 1944
  3. Crossing the Rhine, March 1945

Template:Spoiler In the first set of missions, the player is a soldier on the Russian front, Vasili Ivanovich Koslov. 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 becomes a British soldier, Sergeant John Davis, commanded by Captain Price. Despite carrying the same name and rank as the Captain Price of the original Call of Duty, the different unit assingment (CoD has a Price in the 1st Airborne Division, CoD2 in the 7th Armored Division) makes it impossible for them to be the same person. 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.

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 Cpl. Bill Taylor, commanded by Sgt. Randall, the player starts off by playing a part in a World War II standard level, D-Day, except in this mission the character is not on Omaha beach, but, rather four miles west at Pointe du Hoc. 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 fake decoys, as they actually were. The player then has to fight his way through German trenches and a French village to find them. The remainder of the campaign sees you take 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 non-existed by then.

The final mission is set amongst the Americans in the securing the Rhine crossing into Germany. In the last scene, Sgt. Randall receives a field promotion and suggests to the Colonel that promoted him to promote Cpl. 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.

Multiplayer

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.
  • Team Deathmatch: Two teams battle against each other.
  • Capture the Flag: Players on two different teams must capture the enemy's flag while defending their own.
  • Headquarters: Players must set up headquarters at a random site, and then defend it.
  • 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.

A feature in the Call of Duty series is the Killcam. If a player is killed, the camera shows the game from a few seconds before the kill until the player is dead from the other player's point of view.

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.

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).[2]

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.[3] Other changes included the ability to create private matches, post-game lobbies, and seeing enemy players' names inside of a game.[4] 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.[5] For this reason Infinity Ward again came under some criticism from a 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 62 players.

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

A patch is available for Dual Core processor users that in theory speeds up the frame rate.[6]

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[6]. 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.

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

Reaction

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[7](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.[8] For the PC version, some said that the game's performance is occasionally slow.[9] Others, who reviewed the Xbox 360 version, complained that the multiplayer wasn't as good as it was on the PC version because it was restricted to 8 players further hampered by severe lag which is still being fixed.[10] 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. While the automated save functions works well enough for the most part, it can make the game extremely annoying when failing to work properly. 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 bombs 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 couldn't. 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 move. Finally, the game's mechanic of considering each weapon to have unique ammunition bordered on absurdity, particularly that ammunition from scoped & non-scoped variants of the same exact gun could not be used interchangeably.

United Offensive had both various vehicles and bigger maps, therefore many thought the game was taking a step backwards when it was announced that there would be no vehicles in the game, and so the maps would also get smaller. Activision said that they "never set out to make the best WWII FPS to date" [citation needed], a statement many didn’t see as what a video game company's mentality should be. Others of course liked the thought of more close-quarter combat without large distances, but some argued that this could also be achieved by creating smaller custom maps without vehicles, thus having the possibility to create both large vehicle based maps, and smaller infantry maps. 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.

A historical inaccuracy exists within Call of Duty 2 on the Caen, France levels. Canadian soldiers of the 3rd Canadian Division were the main liberators of Caen, not British infantry. Interestingly, Call of Duty's competitor, Battlefield 1942, did get this fact historically accurate and made their Caen map a battle between Canadian and German troops.

Game weapons

Main article: Weapons in Call of Duty 2

This list is incomplete: for the complete listing, see the main article.

German

American

British

Soviet

Other

In multiplayer mode, all teams may use a combat shotgun named 1897 Trench Gun, which is the Winchester Model 1897.

References

  1. ^ "Duty 2 Tops Xbox 360 Launch Sales". Retrieved December 28. {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |accessdate= (help); Unknown parameter |accessyear= ignored (|access-date= suggested) (help)
  2. ^ "Xbox Live's Major Nelson >> Top 10". Retrieved April 2. {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |accessdate= (help); Unknown parameter |accessyear= ignored (|access-date= suggested) (help)
  3. ^ "IGN: Infinity Wards delivers Call of Duty 2 Update". Retrieved April 2. {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |accessdate= (help); Unknown parameter |accessyear= ignored (|access-date= suggested) (help)
  4. ^ "Xboxic >> The CoD2 Prophecy has been fullfilled". Retrieved April 2. {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |accessdate= (help); Unknown parameter |accessyear= ignored (|access-date= suggested) (help)
  5. ^ "Lag free super glitch match". Retrieved April 2. {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |accessdate= (help); Unknown parameter |accessyear= ignored (|access-date= suggested) (help)
  6. ^ a b "Call of Duty 2 Patch Information". Retrieved April 2. {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |accessdate= (help); Unknown parameter |accessyear= ignored (|access-date= suggested) (help) Cite error: The named reference "dualcorepatch" was defined multiple times with different content (see the help page).
  7. ^ "IGN: Call of Duty 2 Review". Retrieved April 2. {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |accessdate= (help); Unknown parameter |accessyear= ignored (|access-date= suggested) (help)
  8. ^ "Gamespy: Call of Duty 2 Review". Retrieved April 2. {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |accessdate= (help); Unknown parameter |accessyear= ignored (|access-date= suggested) (help)
  9. ^ "Gamespot: Call of Duty 2 for PC Review". Retrieved April 2. {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |accessdate= (help); Unknown parameter |accessyear= ignored (|access-date= suggested) (help)
  10. ^ "Gamespot: Call of Duty 2 for Xbox 360 Review". Retrieved April 2. {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |accessdate= (help); Unknown parameter |accessyear= ignored (|access-date= suggested) (help)


Reviews

  • IGN: Call of Duty 2 PC Review
  • Gamespy: Call of Duty 2 Review (PC)
  • Vito Raliffe: Call of Duty 2 for Xbox 360 Review
  • Gamespot: Call of Duty 2 for PC Review
  • Gamespot: Call of Duty 2 for Xbox 360 Review

    Fansites

    Game Help

    Modding Tools (PC only)

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