STACK #145 Nov 2016

FEATURE GAMES

Gargoyles (1995) Based on the Disney animated series, this Mega Drive title garnered positive review scores with one contemporary commentator calling it, maybe a little too enthusiastically, ‘one of the best games for the Mega Drive’. Medal of Honor (1999) Horton’s first experience with the first-person shooter genre began right here with Spielberg’s excellent game and military shooter forefather, Medal of Honor. Marc Ecko’s Getting Up (2006) Not a great game to be fair, and famously banned here in Australia. The reason? The Classification Board determined that the ‘game promotes the crime of graffiti.’ Silent Hill: Homecoming (2008) What is it with Horton and banned games in Australia? Another title to fall under the Classification Board’s axe. A resubmitted, toned-down game was approved for release the following year. F.E.A.R 3 (2011) A neat survival horror shooter, the best thing about this title was that we got to meet a grumpy horror maestro John Carpenter – who wrote the story – in person at E3. Five Games Brian Horton Has Had a Hand In. Horton’s Handiwork

thing all the way through. It really immerses you into the story.” Part of the challenge for Horton and his art team was to get the aesthetic right. Although the series is no stranger to a future setting, taking Call of Duty into space was a whole new proposition that required a

Kit Harington on set and in game (left).

lot of thought in the design process. What would the soldiers look like? What about the tech? “My team designed everything; characters, environments, effects, UI, weapons, vehicles – you name it,” says Horton. “With a Call of Duty title, the aim is to always strive for that military authenticity but because Infinite Warfare is in space and in the future, we had to extrapolate what we thought that would look like. “So what we did was to take the navy and take NASA and put them together. That was our

which was actually our first level in the game, it really helped us to get the rest of the levels up to that place. That’s the lighting, and that’s the materials, and that’s all of the graphic features that we’ve enhanced for it, including the characters, the reality scans, and getting Kit Harington (the Game of Thrones star plays antagonist Admiral Salen Kotch) in the game. All these things really

helped to bring the game to what we were trying to make. Then the whole team could just crank and get the other levels done.” Horton talks us through how the work his art department contributes to the game fits in with the structure of the overall production. “We have design, narrative and tech and we work in what we call interdisciplinary pods,” he explains. “You’ll

We wanted it to be science fact as much as we could

driving principal of our aesthetic. It was something that felt real and grounded and not too science fiction; we wanted it to be science fact as much as we could. I would say that was our guiding principal. “We produced hundreds and hundreds

of designs and an absolute ton of it ends up on the cutting room floor. It’s the “What if it looked like this? What if it looked like that?”. He leans back and smiles. “Sometimes you need those two things to find out what the final answer is.” Horton encourages his team to always ‘bring their ideas and passions to the table’ and this forms part of his overall modus operandi. On Infinite Warfare , he began by posing a number of questions. What are we trying to do here? What is the statement of quality? “When I came in we took one level and we said, this is the level we’re going to focus on and we’re going to bring it up from where it’s at, which is a foundational level, all the way up to final quality." “Once we had that one level with the final quality,

have in a level every single discipline – animation, effects, design, and art – and we’ll all get around the screen, play it and go, 'this is what we need to do', and we start to rattle off all the things we want to do to make this level and this experience feel finished. “Everyone picks up the task and you just start to see every department organically building this up, and then, once the sound gets in there, the whole thing clicks; that’s the experience we’re trying to land. We have a really close collaboration with all disciplines as we’re developing the game.”

Does Horton prefer to work on the campaign or multiplayer? “Obviously, my comfort zone is campaign, but now I’m really excited about the power of multiplayer and the addictive quality of it. I really want to get better at it, too – I’m always rubbish when I play multiplayer for the first couple of weeks. “I would say what I love about campaign is the stories and the characters and that feeling of evolution and growth; my heart is still there. “But then there are the zombies,” he grins excitedly. “You can’t forget about Zombies.”

• Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare is out now

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