Call of Duty: Ghosts multiplayer revealed

As excited as everyone rightly was about the addition of a dog to the Call of Duty family of gruff angry soldier men, having the reveal of Call of Duty: Ghosts focus on the single player is only ever going to address at most the casual half of the Call of Duty audience. The part they really care about, where they can repeatedly blast each other in the face with ballistic weaponry, that has been kept under wraps until today.

 

Blasted out to a soundtrack of Eminem and industrial strength air conditioning, Activision introduced Ghosts' multiplayer half with a bombastic trailer cut almost too fast to follow, detailing a new focus on cosmetic and functional customisation. Boasting over 20,000 different aesthetic combinations, you'll be able to select your gender for the first time in a Call of Duty game, as well as expand your 'Squad', with up to ten different characters.

It's here that Ghosts starts to look like a different beast to those that came before it, folding what was previously the Spec Ops missions into the Squad umbrella, a series of modes built around those ten characters that you level up and customise as you play. You can take them into fights together, with you playing one and another player taking control of one of their own, while an 'improved' AI will handle the other nine.

There's also what amounts to Horde modes, as well as a series of coop modes, one of which has you fighting with a group of friends against someone else's squad, which will fight without them while they're away. Composition, evidently, is everything, and if your offline squad does well enough, you'll earn experience while you're away from your console.

There's also an attempt to bring CoD into the next generation, with features like dynamic map destruction, and an increased focus on high fidelity audio direction. Forced to occupy a difficult space between console generations, Call of Duty: Ghosts is attempting to bridge that gap by allowing players of the current generation to bring their progress in the game forward into the next generation. Every detail of your play, from your experience levels to your unlocks, are going to be tied to your 'Call of Duty Account', which appears to be consolidation of Elite subscribers along with anyone purchasing Ghosts.