call of duty 2

For the GameCube, PS2 and Xbox game, see Call of Duty 2: Big Red One.

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. ^[2] To date the game has sold over 1.4 million units on the console. ^[3]

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 fewer 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

The difficulty levels in this game are Easy, Regular, Hardened, Veteran. In the first set of missions, the player is a soldier on the Russian front, Private Vasili Ivanovich Koslov (who was first mentioned by his first name in Yuri Petrenko's diary in Call of Duty: United Offensive). Vasili joined the Red Army for revenge; much of his family was killed by German heavy artillery. 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 plays a British soldier, Sergeant John Davis of the Seventh Armoured Division. 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. Throughout most of the missions, you will be covered with Crusader Tanks and Sherman Tanks.

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 Corporal Bill Taylor of the 2nd Ranger Division, the player starts off by playing a part in D-Day. However, unlike other World War II shooting games, the player does not fight on Omaha beach, but instead is 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 decoys, as they were during the actual war. The player then has to fight his way through German trenches and a French village to find the real set of guns. 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-existent by then. Throughout some of the missions, you will be covered with Sherman Tanks.

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 Corporal 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. Person with most kills win.
• Team Deathmatch: Two teams battle against each other. Team with most kills win.
• Capture the Flag: Players on two different teams must capture the enemy's flag while defending their own. Team with most scores win.
• Headquarters: Players must set up headquarters at a random site, and then defend it. Team that defends the HQ for the time limit wins.
• 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. If Allies set a bomb and Axis don't defuse bomb Allies win, if Allies set bomb and Axis defuses Axis wins.

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. Now you can get two new maps from the Xbox Live MarketPlace, but for others you will need Microsoft points or a code from the Call Of Duty 2 Game Of The Year Edition.

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).^[4]

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.^[5] Other changes included the ability to create private matches, post-game lobbies, and seeing enemy players' names inside of a game.^[6] 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.^[7] For this reason Infinity Ward again came under some criticism from 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 64 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.^[8]

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^[8]. 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:

• Carentan, France
• Brecourt, France
• Saint Mère Eglise, France (Dawnville)
• Stalingrad, USSR (Railyard)
• POW Camp, Austria (Officially only available on the Xbox 360 version, fan modded versions can be played on the PC version)
• Rostov, USSR (Harbor), (only available on the PC version with version 1.2 or higher)

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^[9](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.^[10] For the PC version, some said that the game's performance is occasionally slow.^[11] 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 was fixed in a later auto-update.

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 explosives 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. For example the Kar 98 and the scoped Kar 98 ammunition cannot use the same ammunition, even though the only difference is the scope.

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.

In addition, The PC community for the most part feel that IW Nation couldn't care less about the PC version of the game as there were many months before the 1.2 patch which added Punkbuster and Anti-Cheating software. Many gamers even boycotted the game for a while to show their feelings towards IW's lack of care for the PC version.

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.

Furthermore, besides the Tiger tanks, the German side features Panzerkampfwagen IIs. In one mission, one of them kills a squad of Russian soldiers with a single shot inside the ruin they were in, which is impossible, since the Pz II featured only a 20mm machine cannon and a machine gun. Also, in the British tank levels, the PZ II is the adversary of the British tanks, being cited as better armed and armoured than the British Crusader tanks. While the Crusader tanks indeed lacked armour and armament compared to medium German tanks, they definitely outclassed the PZ IIs, the latter weighing little more than seven tons, while the Crusader tanks weighed around 20 tons.

Controversy

A television advertisement for Call of Duty 2 was the subject of some controversy in early 2006. The commercial depicted a 3D computer animated first-person view of events that were supposed to transpire during the game, but rather than being scenes from the game itself, the advertisement was created by Los Angeles animation studio Rhythm and Hues. Many consumers felt that the advertisements were misleading, and in February 2006 the United Kingdom's Advertising Standards Authority demanded that networks pull the advertisements after three consumers filed complaints of false advertising. According to ASA spokesperson Donna Mitchell, "Viewers felt that the ad was misleading because the quality of graphics was superior to that of the game's". Activision denies that the scenes were meant to give an impression of gameplay, stating in a press release shortly after the ASA banning that "The footage was intended purely to communicate the subject matter of the game rather than to represent actual gameplay." ^[12]

Game weapons

Rifles

• M1903A4 Springfield: American bolt-action sniper rifle.
• Lee Enfield No.4 Mk.I: British bolt-action infantry rifle. Also comes in sniper (scoped) configuration.
• Mosin-Nagant M1891/30: Soviet bolt-action infantry rifle. Also comes in sniper (scoped) configuration.
• Mauser Karabiner 98k: German bolt-action, slow-loading. Also comes in a sniper configuration.
• Tokarev SVT-40: Soviet magazine-fed rifle; fast rate of fire and reload.
• Gewehr 43: German magazine-fed rifle; fast rate of fire. Also comes in a sniper version in single player only.
• M1 Carbine: American magazine-fed rifle; underpowered in multiplayer, but with the highest magazine capacity.
• M1 Garand: American clip-fed rifle; powerful. In-game, it cannot be reloaded unless the clip runs empty; real Garand rifles could be reloaded mid-clip, although it required engaging two functions of the rifle at once.
• Winchester M1897 Trench Gun: Powerful 12 gauge shotgun, available to all armies in multiplayer mode only.

Submachine & Machine Guns

• PPSh-41: Soviet submachine gun; powerful but inaccurate at range but very high rate of fire. The drum magazine makes the ammo supply in this weapon comparatively large; excellent for room-clearing and fans of the "spray-and-pray" school of marksmanship.
• PPS-42: Another Soviet submachine gun.
• M1A1 Thompson: American submachine gun also used by the British. Very powerful but inaccurate at range. It has a 20-round magazine. Two or three rounds can kill.
• M3 "Grease Gun" Another American submachine gun. Available to Americans in multiplayer only.
• Sten Mk.II: British submachine gun. Not as powerful as the Thompson or PPSh, but more accurate with less kick.
• Bren: British support/light machine gun. Very powerful with good accuracy, but ammo is rare, and many players commit "Friendly Fire" to pick up ammo. Slow to reload and also to recover from a melee attack.
• M1918A2 BAR (Browning Automatic Rifle): American support/light machine gun; very powerful, relatively accurate, but ammunition is uncommon.
• MP40: German submachine gun. Relatively powerful with longer range and better accuracy than other SMGs, and a sight very easy to use. This gun is easily found and ammo is plentiful.
• Sturmgewehr 44: German assault rifle, the first weapon of its class (often named StG44, MP44 or even MP43) powerful, but ammunition is not as plentiful as for the MP40.

Heavy Weapons

• MG42: German general-purpose machine gun. The MG42 is very powerful weapon with what is possibly the highest rate of fire in a single-barreled weapon, much vibration caused by recoil and because of dust and debris the bullets fly off whatever they hit.
• Browning M1919: American .30-06 caliber machine gun. Powerful, but less common than the MG42 and also has a lower rate of fire.
• Panzershreck: This German weapon is great against armor and sometimes infantry. On the battle of Hill 400, this can be used against the 4 or 5 Panzerwerfers that appear, minimizing the risk of getting shot while applying the sticky bombs. The rockets move slowly, and can miss a halftrack by flying through the gap between the front wheel and tracks.
• Flak 88: Powerful heavy German artillery gun; slow; operator remains vulnerable to enemy fire during reloading time. In the Battle of El-Alamein, this gun can demolish the Panzerwerfer and the infantry it deploys. This gun also turns very slowly, giving the operator a disadvantage when encircled by enemy troops.

Pistols

• TT-30: Soviet semi-automatic Pistol. Fast reload.
• M1911A1 Colt .45: American semi-automatic pistol, known as a powerful and reliable weapon.
• Luger P08: German semi-automatic pistol. More commonly encountered than other pistols.
• Webley Mk.IV: British six-shot revolver, extremely slow reload. One shot should ensure a kill. Ammo is extremely scarce.

Projectiles

• Mod.24 Stielhandgranate: German stick Grenade, relies on blast rather than fragmentation.
• No. 36 Mills Grenade: British fragmentation hand grenade.
• Mk.2 'Pineapple' Grenade: American fragmentation hand grenade.
• RGD-33 Grenade: Soviet fragmentation hand grenade.
• Smoke grenades: Smoke grenade; provides smoke cover.

References

Reviews

• 1up: PC Review
• 1up: X-Box 360 Review
• 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
• gDefine: Call of Duty 2 for Xbox 360 Review
• Gamestyle: Call of Duty 2 Xbox 360 Review

External links

• Official site
• Official Infinity Ward Forums
• Official Online Tournament
• Official Trailer, Screen Shots, Developer Interview on Game Spot
• Call of Duty 2 at DMOZ