here will be a lot of big first person shooters at E3, but one on many minds is Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare. We close out our exclusive Road To E3 2007 coverage with our exclusive interview with Infinity Ward Studio Head Grant Collier, and not only give you the full run-down on this highly anticipated shooter, but a number of new screens as well.

Game Informer: How does it feel to escape the confines of World War II, and do you think you’ll ever go back?

Grant Collier: We are huge fans of World War II, but we’re very developer driven here, so we feel that a lot of the guys have been working on World War II for seven years. I think the United States was only in the war for five years. We’ve been researching it and going through it and giving it a lot of time and TLC to the World War II area, but we know the tenets of Call of Duty—which is the immersion, surrounding yourself with a lifelike squad, having that cinematic intensity—none of those things specifically say, “Only available in World War II.” I checked the underwear on them, and it didn’t state that. We just want to see how people take to different theatres. Some people are saying, “Oh my gosh, they’re closing doors,” and we really think we’re opening doors. There’s a lot of gamers out there who just don’t have an affinity with World War II and because of that have never experienced the love that is Call of Duty. We think by doing this shift right now that we’re going to get a lot of people into the game and then they might look back and go, “Hey, I don’t know what I’ve been missing. I’m going to go back and check out these other Call of Duty’s, because if this is what Call of Duty is all about, I’m into it.”

And we’re not saying that we’re not going back to it at all. The door is definitely open—we’re not shutting any doors, we’re just opening them.

GI: After Call of Duty 2, did you think of doing any other wars before working on Modern Combat, or did you just go right into the modern era?

Collier: The idea for doing a modern warfare game is something that we’ve had for a really long time now. We’ve wanted to make this game for a really long time. It’s not that we wanted to skip a whole bunch of other conflicts—maybe Vietnam, because it’s not fun being shot by a guy hiding in a bush somewhere and then just shooting into the bush. I haven’t seen anyone do a good Vietnam game yet. There’s not a lot of competition in that space, and we really like to go up against heavyweights. We like to compete with the top people in the categories. Who’s the competition in a Korean conflict game? There’s a reason why it’s called a Forgotten War. Not to demean the people who participated in that, which I’m sure it will be taken that way. In the modern scene there’s just a lot of competition, and that excites us. It makes us reach for higher bars.

GI: Were there any modern games that you looked at and said, “OK, we totally don’t want to do it that way,” or were there games where you thought, “Hey, that’s kind of cool, but we can do this aspect better,”?

Collier: I think games in the modern era are a lot more diverse than games that come out in the World War II first-person shooter area. They’ll have an extremely robust multiplayer or they’ll go for a real squad tactics type thing—they really try to focus on their one little area and push that. Hopefully, the goal is that when we come out with Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, people will see that it’s possible to come into a genre and push strong on multiple fronts. We’re hoping that it just raises the bar for modern games all across the line.

GI: Why use a made-up Middle Eastern conflict instead of going after something in the real world?

Collier: Well, it’s actually a made-up global conflict that just has parts in the Middle East. We spent a lot of time going through modern conflicts, and none of them seemed to fit the Call of Duty gameplay. Call of Duty has always been about two equal sides going against each other in sort of a see-saw battle, and you’re not sure who’s going to come out on top. We didn’t want Call of Duty 4 to be about one country turning another country into a parking lot. We wanted it to be similar to the rest of the Call of Duty franchise, so you need a nice, juicy opponent who’s well-funded and it’s not a foregone conclusion when you go into the game who’s going to win. That’s why we created Zakhaev and worked with how he’s really well-funded and how he’s not just cooking up an army and trying to do his civil war in Russia—he’s actually got the backing of a lot of the military. And he goes to lengths to exterminate other members of the military who aren’t playing ball with him. He knows the Western powers will get involved, so he wants to such away a majority of the Western powers’ military apparatus, so that’s why he gets in with al-Assad, and that’s why he has al-Assad cause that coup. It just allowed us the freedom to create that level playing field that Call of Duty players expect.

GI: One of the things that’s always been about the Call of Duty games is the ability to play as different factions instead of playing as the same crew all of the time. What are the factions people will be able to play as in Call of Duty 4, and what are their major differences?

Collier: It’s Marines, the Marines Force Recon and also the British SAS. You play as Marine Force Recon, and you’re fighting alongside regular Marines, also. You have the British SAS who are doing sort of clandestine, covert operations, but they also will fight alongside loyalist Russians, who are against Zakhaev. Those are the two main storylines, and they sort of weave together in a climactic finish that I cannot reveal.