Above: Vehicles make a lot of noise in Call of Duty: WWII.
GamesBeat: I guess the sound guys don’t have to do this kind of traveling, but the artists have to do a lot more.
Salud: Sound guys actually travel as well. They can be pretty creative at replicating something, but knowing Dave, he’d want to be there. Like the tank sounds. It’s not good enough to just emulate that. He found some billionaire who has a whole garage full of tanks. He’s slamming doors and starting them up and driving them around. They got legitimate stuff.
GamesBeat: Do you feel like you found enough historically preserved stuff to work with?
Salud: Oh, yeah. There were museums where we were able to get access to not just what the public sees, but—there are people who stockpile loads of WWII artifacts, all kinds of things. I don’t know how they do it. Ammo and shells and weapons. And that’s just the historian community. There’s a whole separate community of re-enactors. Those guys are hardcore. They’ve likewise been collecting stuff. They have all the weapons, the gear, the vehicles.
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When I was at Normandy, I went to the memorial cemetery on D-Day. People had flown in from all over the world. They’d dress up in every single kind of uniform, every country represented. We went there and scanned everything. It was awesome.
GamesBeat: Your job also involves depicting the Axis side, showing what it’s like to be a Nazi. There’s some potential controversy in that.
Salud: From a single-player standpoint, a narrative standpoint, we are showing a bit of that. We’re not trying to paint a black and white picture. It’s different. Hitler took advantage of a situation where Germany was going through a struggle after WWI. The entire country isn’t necessarily a part of that. We want to bring some of that complexity into our story.
GamesBeat: We saw a lot of diversity among Allied soldiers in the trailer. What did you have to do track down to find out what some of these people might look like? Like the women Resistance fighters. There can’t be many photos of them.
Salud: You’d be surprised. It really helps to have a historian along. Our historian, Marty Morgan, wasn’t just a guy who does this as his job, taking down data. He felt like it was his personal mission to preserve this. He went to different families to take down their stories. He has a grasp on it from an emotional level, all the nuances. When I asked him what a Resistance fighter would look like, he came back with, “Oh, I know this family whose grandmother fought. Here’s all these photos.” He was like the internet, but just for WWII.
At the same time, we were very mindful of history. We didn’t break historical accuracy. Everything we wanted to do had to have our historian’s blessing. He had to find a living example, which he did. You’d be surprised by all the different things that really happened.
GamesBeat: Was there a lot of WWII that you didn’t know about, then?
Salud: Oh, yeah, all kinds of stuff. The detail of the storytelling he could give us—I don’t think any movie or documentary that I’ve seen can top what he had to tell us. It’s his whole life, basically.
Above: Call of Duty: WWII has stark imagery.
GamesBeat: For this, did you have to staff up considerably?
Salud: We always have to hire, yeah. The project’s huge. We’re building all of France, it feels like. [laughs] But seriously, sometimes I have to remind people. “What’s taking so long?” “You know we’re building the whole French countryside, right? Just drive right through it.” It’s a world, a virtual world.
We’ve come a long way since Advanced Warfare. We have 4K and HDR now. I’m more interested in HDR than 4K, personally. The depth of the hues—we used to talk about characters and tech and skin and things like that. We’d show off Kevin Spacey and be like, “Look what we did!” We were really proud of it. And now that’s nothing. It looks like a doll compared to what we can do today.
4K, for me, is more about resolution, seeing more details. HDR is about seeing more light. The same amount of light that I see when I look at you, I’ll be able to see that once a TV projects that. HDR is a surprise, because the range of color isn’t something I personally placed in there. The renderer brings those physical properties to life.
GamesBeat: What do you see that obviously stands out?
Salud: What it is specifically—it’s not necessarily about matching colors. I can move colors from here over to there. It’s the response of the light. It’s nothing that I do as an art director. In the old days I’d go, “I want to put these specific green here,” and I’d do it. That’s not what happens anymore. Now it’s taking into account how the light hits the skin. Light goes into the skin, scatters. It takes into account that there’s blood in there. That’s where the red comes from. Nobody paints that in. It’s all a procedural approximation of physical skin.
You see these eyes here? It’s not necessarily just about color. I can communicate moisture in the eye, compared to this. That’s what creates the softness, the scatter. We had subsurface scattering before, but the way we know how to hone it now is much deeper. Here there’s only one kind of spec. Your skin has many layers with multiple specs underneath. Imagine light that hits. It’ll have spec, and then it penetrates, and it has a different spec, and on down. We have multiple layers of scattering in the face. That’s how you get this subtlety. It’s an intangible thing that we couldn’t do there. To me it’s like night and day.
GamesBeat: It seems like a good time to revisit this. It’s been long enough since people have seen WWII in games. We’ve never seen it in this way. It’s fresh again.
Salud: Internally we do these exercises where we pull up the old Call of Duty games and put them next to what we have now. When was World at War, 10 years ago? It’s incredible, the difference.
