This has got to be the laziest thing I've seen in a while and definitely not something I'd expect from an AAA game. This is bordering on Bioware-tier recycling.

I wouldn't be surprised if this is a coincidence. I feel like I've seen that scene in every war shooters with helicopters.

That's pretty funny. And no one would EVER know if not for internet.

@audiobusting: Look at the animation. They've used the same damn ones. Horribly lazy of them.

@audiobusting: It's definitely a run-of-the-mill military shooter extraction scenario, but a coincidence? What, they just happened to animate two scenes almost exactly alike?

The fuck you talking about? One clearly has a helicopter, the other has a car? Shit, this blatant shitting on COD is getting ridiculous.

The movements don't match up perfectly, but the timing is next to exact. This is mad fishy.

@nekroskop: @sharkethic: They're not exactly the same, so I'm willing to give them the benefit of the doubt. Maybe the mocap actors, animators and directors are just so used to making these games that the scenes all start to look alike, not unlike in movie trailers editing and some pop music.

GOTY

Reminds me of how Michael Bay reused a scene from The Island and put it in Transformers 3.

COD has been recycling the exact same animations since COD4, just look at the animation when you fall, or when you see someone hit by a flashbang. Plus I watched some multiplayer and they are still using the same audio clips. COD is recycling of assets to the highest degree.

Do you work for Infinity Ward? Did you do the animations for both games, and now you're terribly embarrassed!? You have to tell us if you do!

hehe, And it looks better in MW2, that's bizarre.

@sharkethic said:

That's a myth, man! I don't have to tell you even if I work for Activision®. Which I don't! Anyway, I love playing this exciting fresh entry to the Call of Duty® video game franchise and I'm sure it has hours worth of all-new content™!

(Seriously though -- considering how derivative everything in the single-player campaign I've seen so far looks, I wouldn't be surprised either way.)

Did someone say... FISH?!

People are super quick to defend dat cod!

Who cares? There's also nothing lazy about it. It's similar to movies where sets and props are reused all the time. Not because people are lazy but because it's dumb to waste time and money recreating something from scratch if you already have something that serves your exact purpose.

So just more or less reusing the same animations/framing etc. isn't lazy? What about explosions? Those are generally the same thing from game to game, so just reuse those too? What about other animations like walking, shooting? Or graphics? Just reuse all of that from game to game since those "serve the exact purpose"? I understand why IW would do it, but it's the definition of lazy.

The fact the animations are different makes me think it's more of a nod to the previous game than a complete rip off.

Disney was the king of doing this:

Deja Vu at its finest.

How dare they still Nintendos cut and paste design philosophy!

No I thought the dog was Riley *ba-dum tsh*

ohhhhh SNAP!!

Wasn't that because a stunt went wrong and he had no choice but to do that? No such problem with this. They just reused animations.

Pretty sure it's intentional - they are starting a new "series" of CoD games - expect to see "Ghosts: Spectres" or "Ghosts: Double Ghosts" in two years time (assuming that Mr. Kotick has not sacrificed the IW team in a bid to please the sun god (who is also the stock-market god)). So they are deliberately calling back to that ending - they are trying to say this is the new storyline, these are the new characters. The animations are not exactly the same - but they are similar.

is that the only scene they copied?

Isn't this almost exactly what they're doing already, though? Same shit, different setting? Seems like par for the course to me, but still, to more or less just copy/paste the end cinematic from a previous game in the franchise is not only lazy by Infinity Ward standards, it's telling of a company that has literally run out of ideas and are just mindlessly going through the motions of making one of these fucking things every year.

@benpicko: Not sure, but they could've reshot it. Apparently he did this for the first Transformer as well, using footage from Pearl Harbour.

So Michael Bay uses footage from his terrible movies to fuel his other terrible movies? :P

@sharkethic: Indeed, I'm not saying I'm surprised by this, it's just so shameless!

A lot of sequels use the same animations as the previous game.

I also heard the entire campaign is just a reskin. Then again...that really isn't news for most of us.

Hahahahahaha

Came into this thread all jaded about the COD copy/pasta but super fascinated by the animation copies. While those are all valid arguments that it's common I feed the COD thing is a bit much because it's more common that someone is playing Ghost that will remember that scene from MW.

Tubular

@andorski: there's a "whoa, what, WHOA!" audio clip in Sword in the Stone that they use about seven or eight times throughout the movie, sometimes within 5 seconds of each other. I believe in one case the protagonist says it as he's about to fall, and then seconds later while actually falling.

Reusing assets. As old as artistic expression itself.

Seems more like an homage than anything. With them calling the game Ghosts and featuring skull balaclava's, I expected there to be some pretty explicit links between this and MW2.

EDIT: Oh man. I just ran across some compelling evidence that suggests that Ghost from MW2 is now the dog from Ghosts.

People are seriously defending this? That's just sad.

This is sad to see but it's expected. COD has been reusing assets and animations for the longest. It's hard re-wrapping the same gift each year and call it new. They just got caught this time. Pimps can mess up.

Going by this thread I think people would be surprised by how many assets are recycled in games. The best part for developers is finding a way to re-purpose it and get away with it.

They did something similar in MW3. I bet there is a ton of other reused assets that we have not noticed.

Okay, I don't give a shit about CoD, never played more than 5 minutes of one, so I'm not defending this game at all, but couldn't this be intentional? A purposeful call back to something in a previous story? It happens in other media all the time, and while a lot of it is absolute laziness (every Rob Liefeld comic), there can be a fun deeper meaning for fans who get the reference.

Also, "reusing" animation from a 4 year old game just doesn't really work like that. You can't just copy/pate animation from one engine to another without significant tweaks. So even if the animator was just watching and replicating the old footage, it wouldn't have even been that big of a time saver.

Does anyone know if calling back to that old scene with this one has any story relevance?

Well the reason for that is because the stunt they actually recorded left a woman paralysed, so its not really the same thing here.

You actually believe that Ghosts is running on a brand new engine? LOL.

The definition of lazy isn't wasting time recreating something that you've already previously created. Game developers reuse assets all the time and it's kind of weird that all of a sudden someone posted a video to youtube and now everyone is angry. Are you prepared to call every developer lazy for reusing assets or only the ones you don't like?

Sigh. I believe that none of us know what updates to the engine they've made, so that's entirely irrelevant. I know from personal experience that copy/pasting keyframes onto a new IK skeleton, even if it's identical, can be a pain in the ass. And that to animate something as simple as the scene above, it would always take less time to just do it from scratch than to deal with the hassle of "reusing" old data.

Using geometry like buildings from older games just requires new textures/shaders, so that actually is a big time saver. Using old animation, not so much.

And please don't "LOL" at me, dude. You just sound like a dick.

How do you know this wasn't because something got messed up in the production process and they had to have something? CoD games have extremely fixed development cycles, it's not like they can slip anything.

I get why devs would reuse assets, but those assets also tend to be things you don't normally focus on in the course of gameplay. Exceptions to this are tampered with in some way so as to hide the fact that they were reused. Other than that, there's always homage/callbacks. If this cutscene is really a reused asset, it seems to me more like laziness or desperation than pragmatism.