Introduction

The team at developer Infinity Ward continue to be one of the most reliable game developers in the US. A lot of the team started out at 2015 where they helped to create EA's PC title Medal of Honor: Allied Assault in 2002 which jump started the WWII shooter genre. After that a number of the team's founders left to form Infinity Ward and got a deal with Activision to create Call of Duty in late 2003, another WWII shooter game that managed to surprise everyone by being better than their previous work on Medal of Honor. Activision acquired Infinity Ward afterwards and then the developer released Call of Duty 2 in 2005. While it was a solid PC game success it really scored on the Xbox 360, becoming a must have game for the launch of Microsoft's second game console.

So what is the Infinity Ward formula for making great first person shooter games? Simply put, they keep the action going and don't let up for one second. While some have accused the developer of making games that are too linear, it's that focus of making the player encounter every cool situation the designers have constructed that makes their ames entertaining from start to finish. From storming the beaches at Normandy to fighting off hordes of Nazis in Russia, Medal of Honor: Allied Assault and Call of Duty 1 and 2 put the player in harrowing situations from start to finish.

Infinity Ward chose to skip making Call of Duty 3 (and it showed in the game's final release) to move up to the next level for Call of Duty 4. This time the decision was made to finally dump the WWII genre and move onto the present day. Indeed Call of Duty 4 might seem to some as an odd title for the game; aside from the first person shooter genre itself there's really nothing to link this new game to the previous all Call of Duty titles. Obviously this was meant by publisher Activision as a marketing scheme; new IP (Intellectual Property) can be a hard sell, even if it is made by Infinity Ward. So Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare may share the same title but in many ways this new game represents a quantum leap over the two previous Infinity Ward developed games in the series.