Call of Duty: Ghosts: The Return of Infinity Ward

Our first look at Call of Duty: Ghosts is a listen. Audio lead Stephen Miller leads us into the ultra quiet studio where he and a team of audio engineers create the gunshots, grenade explosions and booming fireballs heard in Call of Duty games. He wants us to hear the new reverb system that's being added to Infinity Ward's revamped game engine.

The sound of gunfire in Ghosts will be affected by the player's environment. Outdoors, shots ring out with these "big, long tails" that drag out, explains sound designer Dave Rowe, offering a reminder of the sound of a round firing. Inside, that shot echoes with reverb. The shape of the space and the materials within affect the sound further. A gun fired in a wide-open hangar sounds markedly different from the same gun fired inside a concrete tube.

Those tweaks to the explosive sounds of a Call of Duty game will give players a sense of place, Rubin says, helping them connect their actions in the game with the world they're inhabiting.

"We recorded everything from five pounds of black powder to 25 pounds of black powder," says Rowe. "We recorded C4, we recorded ANFO, all kinds of different explosions — things that give different sounds based off of how the explosives actually work.

"Black powder's really slow, C4 is really sharp, so it's a real sharp crack. We can take bits and pieces from different microphones, different perspectives and use them in the sound design for all the grenades, flash bangs, any of the other big explosions that take place in the game, even some of the smaller ones can become sweeteners on specific weapons. A shotgun for instance."

The team shows us the biggest explosion they filmed, some 50 pounds of ammonium nitrate buried in the ground. The blast, a huge, mushroom cloud that circled by a smoky ring, is astounding. Infinity Ward staffers still sound excited about the opportunity to partake in all this explosive destruction in the pursuit of making video games, recounting the feel of the shockwaves from each explosion and the showers of dirt and debris that reached them hundreds of yards away.

"This is much scarier than you can even imagine," Rubin says. "By the end of the week we were all quite relieved to [get] back to normal sounds; things that weren't quite so jarring."

Call of Duty: Ghosts's dog is a German Shepherd named Riley. His name is a reference to Lieutenant Simon "Ghost" Riley, the masked British special forces soldier from Modern Warfare 2. When I visited Infinity Ward, the developer wasn't ready to reveal the name its dog. But it did dispel rumors that he was named Colin.

Lead Animator Zach Volker explains how Riley went from an index card on corkboard to a companion in Ghosts.

"We got a navy SEAL to come up with his dog and tell us about how dogs work with the teams and how they're trained and the experiences they go through; the technologies they use," Volker says. "Really, what came of it though, was the emotional connection, which really endeared us to the idea that we had to put a dog in the game. To hear someone saying 'I'll take a bullet for my dog' that emotional tie-in was something we really wanted to try and capture with the game."

To make Riley look and animate believably, Infinity Ward set about filming the movement of a military service dog on a motion capture sound stage.

"These dogs have been known to — if they can hit someone at full speed — just literally rip biceps out," says Volker.

Infinity Ward found what it was looking for with Roscoe, a German Shepherd owned by a handler in Southern California. Like those of their human counterparts, the real names of Navy SEAL dogs are protected.

Infinity Ward's first attempt at outfitting the dog with the light-sensitive markers tracked by motion capture cameras went "horribly wrong," Volker says. They bought spandex suits designed for dogs — which worked — but applying markers to the dog's feet was problematic. Rubber booties, their first attempt, was a failure.

"The dog looked like he was walking around in honey," Volker said. "It was hysterical; the funniest walk you've ever seen. But I was thinking to myself, 'We're not going to get a single thing out of this. This is ridiculous.'"

They settled on a combination of medical tape and reflective metallic tape attached to the dog's fur.

"We were able to put little folded bits of reflective tape on his feet and on sensitive areas like his ears, jaw and face to get the fidelity we were after," Volker said. "And he was okay with it for the most part. Occasionally he would shake his head and try to shake the markers off and he would get one or two of them off every once in awhile. So we'd just reapply."

Volker shows us portions of the motion capture session with Roscoe. He, the dog's handler and motion cap technician Eric Feinberg teased movements out of the dog, capturing walks, runs, jumps, aggressive and passive idle animations. In the footage, Roscoe barks viciously at this handler as the man whips a towel and cracks a whip.

"He looks like he's going to eat your head off," Volker says, "but really it's just a game to him. He's just playing."

Roscoe was only part of the equation. To capture other movements for Riley, Infinity Ward brought in a second dog.

A Belgian Malinois, a trained biter, was brought in to capture a series of tackle and takedown motions. The biter, which we'll call "Buddy," worked with a trainer in a lightweight biting suit (outfitted with mocap markers) to capture the violent ballet of dog and target in an active takedown. Volker shows us a series of painful-looking attacks performed by Buddy, running at full sprint at his trainer, snatching his arm in his jaw and thrashing wildly.

"Eventually we took the gerbil out of his cage, just out of curiosity. 'What's going to happen with a free gerbil running around the mocap stage and the dog?' Roscoe came up and he would sniff it, but eventually nipped at it and the gerbil went, 'Ah!' and ran away. And we said, 'That's the end of that.'"

The gerbil survived the mocap session unharmed, Infinity Ward assures us. For proof, Ackrich brings him in to Volker's animation studio. He's been living comfortably in a Habitrail at the studio since his meeting with Roscoe. He's the office pet. Ackrich jokes that he's been named "Lunch."

After the motion capture sessions, Roscoe and Buddy's motion-captured animations were cleaned up by a pair of animators, who also had to create a handful of movements from scratch; things impossible to capture on a set. Riggers and 3D modelers created Riley the dog's digital body and skeleton, to which hi-res textures taken from photos of Roscoe were applied.

Infinity Ward then set about bridging the gap between reality and fantasy, recreating "how dogs are really used and how we wanted to use them in the game," Volker says. Early on, the developer expected service dogs to serve as something like a weapon.

"Your gut reaction to a dog is, 'Oh, he's going to chew people's heads off,'" Volker says. "When we started to talk to the handlers, really the dogs were a communication device." They sniff out explosives and track human scents, warning a team of Navy SEALs about imminent threats.

"We then had to wrestle with the expectations of what our fans thought a dog would be [like in Call of Duty], and what a dog really does. If we did what a dog really does, would fans think, 'This is kind of boring. He's just sniffing around everywhere and telling us things.' So we had to play with that balance of that. Realism is not something we shoot for here. We shoot for what we call, 'believability.'"

In Ghosts, players will be able to command the dog and see through a flip-up camera mounted to Riley's back, offering a "third-dog perspective." Players will be able to issue commands to the dog, having him cause distractions or take down enemies.

Riley is outfitted with gadgets based on technology really used with military dogs. He has vibrating sensors on the right and left side of his head and an earpiece that allows for remote commands.

The new Infinity Ward is slick, but not ostentatious. Beyond the cool hallways where executive offices and audio teams work are wide open spaces, bordered by clusters of offices that hold visual effects artists, animators and programmers. A massive room filled with rolling whiteboards, coffee tables with whiteboard tops and partitions serves as a communal area for impromptu design meetings. One rolling whiteboard we see, before it's noticed, moved and turned around by a staffer, holds a massive list of ideas for new multiplayer perks.

This is where Infinity Ward holds testing sessions that Ackrich calls "Kleenex tests." They'll bring in someone off the street — often, someone who notices that an Infinity Ward staffer is wearing a Call of Duty t-shirt — let them play the game for a few hours, solo, get their feedback and excuse them. The gamer is not invited back.

On the Friday we visit Infinity Ward, the developer is having its "Friday Night Fights," when employees get together for a team multiplayer session. They're playing Call of Duty: Ghosts's multiplayer, which Rubin says is highly R&Ded, highly iterative.