Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare Team Consulted with Pentagon

Sometimes a company will go an extra mile for the sake of authenticity. For example, famously, Pixar had its animators study fish to make the movement in Finding Nemo would be scientifically and anatomically correct. I also happen to remember that the old 2005 game, The Incredible Hulk, the animators and sound team went to a junkyard and smashed up cars and other metal junk to make the destruction seem more genuine. And of course, when making Call of Duty: Black Ops II, had the consulting help of P.W. Singer.

There are other examples, I'm sure, but I can't think of them off the top of my head so I'm just going to move on.

Point is, there's a precedent. Of course, it's hard to make a realistic game when it's set 40 years in the future, but that hasn't stopped Sledgehammer Games, the developer behind Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare from trying—and in that quest they've actually revealed they brought a member of the Department of Defense from the Pentagon to consult on the title.

This "scenario planner" works with the United States Government and Armed Forces to imagine the conflicts, technologies, and tactics of tomorrow and prepare accordingly. Through this employee's consult, the Sledgehammer team made Private Military companies the main antagonists, added directed energy weapons, and the use of exoskelletons in combat (which is totally a real thing)… all with the expectation that those will be ‘commonplace' in the hypothetical future where this game takes place.

"We brought in a lot of outside help – military advisers, futurologists - we got together with a scenario planner from the department of defense, who is active in the Pentagon. His job is to think about future threats and prepare ‘what if' scenarios for the US government. So we asked him, what do you think will be the conflict of tomorrow?"

Fun fact, there were a lot of "maybe" situations that this scenario planner rejected—he said china wouldn't be a threat because it would collapse under it's own economic weight, the Cold War wasn't going to reignite, and Islam extremists were a historic "flavor of the month".

Still, "PMC attacks America" was old when Tom Clancy started doing it, I'm not sure it's THAT exciting a scenario… but who knows, maybe there's a twist I have yet to see.