Call of Duty Modern Warfare 3 première in Paris

The première event is taking place at Palais Brongniart, former French temple of finance, now hosting conferences and events. Like several other guests, I arrived around a quarter earlier, too scared to miss anything of it. We finally get in and discovered our hosts: Robert Bowling, creative strategist at Infinity Ward, and Glen Schofield, vice president & general manager at Sledgehammer Games.

The premiere opens with a live demonstration with the chapter "Mind the gap" taking place in England. The demonstrator has obviously some training behind her and we quickly lost count of her victims. As always with Modern Warfare games, the action going is epic and breathtaking. The teammates play their part as well. Without interfering with the player game, they support her and we can see them doing some peripheral actions as well. Really awesome!

And it's just getting even better. Without spoiling the story, let's say that the mission doesn't go as planned and the player finds herself right in the middle of flying bullets, with a climax consisting of a chase in subway tunnels, panicking the civilians awaiting their train on the platforms . Quite an impressive show with a giant screen and adequate sound system. The demonstration concludes with thunderous applause!

Robert Bowling and Glen Schofield then take sometime to present a little bit more the game and especially the "specs ops" (cooperation) and multiplayer modes. Glen Schofield believes Modern Warfare 3 to offer the most balanced multiplayer game of the series and they've worked a lot for that; re-thinking for example the progression system. Now you get XP points by killing opponents obviously, but also by completing objectives or assisting allies.

"Specialist packages" made their entries as well, rewarding player specializing themselves. With them, the more you use a weapon, the more advanced it gets. Outside the weapons, you get also rewarding for your behavior. Playing scavenger taking time to scavenge all corpses for example, might bring you an unexpected bonus when you'll need it in the future.

I'm a fan of the franchise and I didn't need more than what I had seen already to rush on the game on November 8th. Now I'm really happy to have tons of games to finish as otherwise I would have really find time spending far too slowly. Yes, the graphic rendering has not really improved for what I've seen but we're talking about Modern Warfare, a reference which can bear to wait one more episode before seeing its graphical engine reworked. Actually there was also something at that premiere that I'm not authorized to write about right now... and believe me it was really exciting as well. Be sure I'll get back to that next month (thanks to Activision for helping me teasing my future entry here ;)).

I also had the opportunity to exchange a few words with Glen Schofield and you might be interested to know that he is tweeting regularely and especially covering this #MW3 tour. So if you're on twitter as well, you can follow @GlenSchofield from now on. Hey! You might learn about a premiere organized in your town!