Call of Duty: Ghosts is about America's deepest fear - losing power, says scriptwriter

“I did riff off people’s fears of America not being a superpower any more - we’re looking at one possible future, ten or fifteen years away,” says Stephen Gaghan, the scriptwriter on Call of Duty: Ghosts.

“Call of Duty has explored the past pretty thoroughly - it’s time to move on to the future,” Gaghan says. “I like to think that Vietnam veterans could play this with their grandchildren.”
 
There are 40 million Call of Duty players around the world, and satisfying a fanbase that large is “tricky”, Gaghan admits. Passions run so high about the game that when the time it took to reload one of the game’s guns was changed, death threats were voiced on Twitter.

Gaghan won an Oscar for his script of the film Traffic, starring Catherine Zeta Jones. He also wrote the hit war film Black Hawk Down - which he describes as having “one half of one level’s worth of Ghosts” in terms of action.

Gaghan says the game’s “feel” owes a lot to soldiers’ stories about Vietnam - and TV shows such as Band of Brothers. But the devastated America that the eponymous “Ghosts” - American guerilla fighters - explore isn’t so far from reality, he says.

“But you can feel it now - you drive around, the roads are falling apart. The whole thing doesn’t work. You fly to a country that’s supposed to be a third world country, and they have these perfect highways, public buildings, public transportation. You go back to America, and you’re trying to find a bathroom in Santa Monica, and you think, ‘Oh my God’.”

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Ghosts is the first in the series to appear on next-gen consoles such as Xbox One - but will also appear on Xbox 360 and PS3.

The series has sold 100 million units. Until the launch of Grand Theft Auto V this year, Call of Duty Black Ops was the fastest-selling game of all time in Britain.

“Games are becoming a cinematic experience - we’re in the middle of that change,” says Gaghan. “It’s making a big noise. There’s a kind of immersive experience people are drawn to - and Call of Duty is one of those.”

Ghosts is the first Call of Duty game to abandon history entirely - it’s set in a near-future world where hackers break into American space defenses and attack the USA. The player is a “Ghost” - part of a small team of special forces soldiers waging a guerilla war to restore America to its former glory.

The game will once again feature choices where the player influences the storyline - and multiple endings.

“Moral choice for the player is going to be a big part of Ghosts,” says Gaghan. “It’s the notion of revenge - whether to take revenge, or whether not to. Both those ideas, and the idea of the family are explored in quite a cool way.”

One of the game’s most talked-about new features is a dog, which works alongside the player. Its movements were created using a real U.S. Army attack dog wearing a motion-capture suit.

“I never want to write a movie without a dog again,” says Gaghan. “The dog is just cool - although my future scripts probably won’t involve ones with special forces training. While we were working, one of the guys actually had this huge white dog, and everyone’s working and this huge white dog, it’s like a wolf, comes wandering through. That helped to inspire us.”

Previous Call of Duty games often took inspiration from war films - but Gaghan focuses on a more authentic approach.

“My inspiration - and the team’s - was mostly books by real soldiers,” he says, “Tim O’Brien’s book about Vietnam, The Things They Carried, that book was read by every person on the team. Band of Brothers, the TV series, was also a big inspiration - and I had already worked on Black Hawk Down, so I was familiar with a lot of stuff.”

Gaghan says that Ghosts crams in a great deal more action - and that Black Hawk Down would be a moment in a level in Call of Duty.

“Those snipers firing from every direction, that would be one part of one level,” he says, “Then the level would turn, a dam would break, then your helicopter doesn’t work, then you’re underwater, then you’ll go, ‘We’ll use a submarine.’”

Gaghan says that he’s very aware that some gamers will skip the dialogue - “I’ve watched my own 13-year-old son do it” - and says that you “barely have time” to add character. But he says that as games become closer to films in visual quality, the script will become more important.

“Five years ago, Call of Duty came up on my radar,” he says, “So I jumped at it. Game scriptwriting isn’t like it was - where you fill in the blanks in a finished game - I came in six months before the end, so there was a lot that wasn’t fixed.”

“The game is always about the game - so it’s a hard job. It’s about the gameplay, and the rules of the game are very specific. You have to not be killed, and you have to kill certain people. A lot of the thinking is servicing the action. But if you can make people care about the team, that’s never a bad thing” 

“The graphics have become so incredible that it really looks like a real experience,” Gaghan says.  “That’s going to continue - and when it does, that human element will become ever more important. It’s changing - the plot, the dialogue, it was discussed from the start. As we go on, games are going to pay ever more attention to plot and dialogue.”