Ten years after a devastating mass event, the nation's borders and the balance of global power have been redrawn forever. A superpower no more, its economy and government in ashes, the country's once-mighty military struggles to stave off complete collapse. As what's left of the nation's Special Operations forces, a mysterious group known only as 'Ghosts' leads the fight back against a newly emerged, technologically-superior global power.
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Riley, the German Shepherd who fights alongside you as the Walker brothers' loyal companion, wasn't just tacked on for cute factor. Infinity Ward actually put a real dog through motion capture to get his movement right, and Riley ended up being one of the star attractions of the entire Xbox One reveal event in May 2013, right alongside the console itself.
The realism behind Riley didn't come from nowhere. Activision brought in Mike Ritland, a former Navy SEAL who trained actual military working dogs and runs the Warrior Dog Foundation, to consult on the character. That's why Riley moves, reacts, and takes commands like a genuine combat K9 rather than a video game mascot.
That jaw-dropping opening where the ISS gets hijacked and destroyed wasn't handed down from on high. According to level designer Justin Rote, he personally pitched the idea of an enemy takeover of the International Space Station, and it was greenlit and eventually became the mission that anchored most of the game's marketing and E3 footage. Building the zero-gravity traversal and full station destruction sequence was apparently one of the toughest technical challenges of the whole project.
Infinity Ward talked up Ghosts as running on a brand new engine, but dataminers and analysts who dug into the game found it was really the same engine that powered Modern Warfare 3, just with a heavy round of upgrades and new rendering tricks bolted on rather than a ground-up rebuild.
Before Ghosts existed, there was a scrapped Neversoft project called Call of Duty: Future Warfare that never saw daylight. Some assets from that cancelled game apparently found their way into Ghosts, and eagle-eyed fans noticed the protagonist of Future Warfare shared a surname, Walker, with Logan and Hesh Walker in the finished game.
Ghosts turned out to be the weakest-performing modern Call of Duty entry, and the fallout was real: instead of returning to finish the story it left hanging on a massive cliffhanger, Infinity Ward moved on and built Infinite Warfare instead. The Ghosts universe never got its follow-up.
Ghosts was made under genuinely rough circumstances behind the scenes. After Activision fired Infinity Ward co-founders Jason West and Vince Zampella, a wave of staff walked out in solidarity, and the studio had to scramble to bring in new hires along with Raven Software and Sledgehammer Games just to get the game finished, all while those new teams were still learning how Call of Duty games were even built.
Extinction mode gets called 'alien mode' by basically everyone, but the Cryptids you're gunning down were on Earth long before humans, or even the dinosaurs. The lore ties them back to a prehistoric cataclysm, a comet igniting the atmosphere in a firestorm, which the creatures supposedly survived by going into hiding underground, only to get stirred up again by the ODIN strike in the main campaign.
A sequel to Extinction actually got into prototype stages, reportedly featuring base building and RTS-style elements, with a story where humanity turns out to be an offshoot of the Cryptids and a character named Samantha Cross becomes the villain. It never made it out, since Infinity Ward apparently didn't want 'aliens' cluttering up the space setting of the next game, and the idea gave way to a Zombies mode for Infinite Warfare instead.
During the 'All or Nothing' mission, after crossing over to a platform on a carrier via Osprey, the game drops into slow motion as you spot enemy soldiers about to execute a captured ally who happens to be called Private Ryan. Gun them down in time and you've effectively re-enacted the rescue from Spielberg's film, right down to the name.
