You Can Bark Orders to Call of Duty‘s Happy Scrappy Hero Pup

Though he practically upstaged the Xbox One at its own reveal event, don’t expect Call of Duty Dog to slink off into a corner during E3 week. He’s not going to be eye candy or a prop in Call of Duty: Ghosts‘ singleplayer campaign. If anything, developer Infinity Ward is doubling down on the Dog.

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The dog, based on real life service canines used by the Navy SEALs, will be controllable much in the same way drones were in Black Ops. That’s in the singleplayer campaign. No word yet on what role Call of Duty Dog fulfills in multiplayer, if any. Mark Rubin, the game’s executive producer, told Kotaku that “multiple dogs” were mo-capped for the game’s action sequences, and the one in-game will respond to user commands as well as move and act on his own.

IGN, in this E3 preview, got a closer look at what Call of Duty Dog does. He’ll be “controlled by the player via a tablet-like viewefinder,” that approximates the periscope-mounted camera seen on the dog’s back, and an earpiece that sends him commands. Players will be able to target an enemy and tap a shoulder button to send Call of Duty Dog bounding after an enemy to rip out his throat. He can also bark to cause a distraction, setting up a mark to get shot by an AI teammate.

“There are different points in the story—-I don’t want to go too much into it—-we learned a lot from the Navy SEAL about how they used them,” Rubin told us. “And we, I think, brought a lot of that into the game. There are different ways that the SEALs use their dogs and I think we’re going to show that really well.” Rubin added that “the dog was phenomenal as far as an experience as a game developer.

“One of the good things as a game developer is that we get to do some cool-ass shit,” he said, doing motion-capture with Call of Duty Dog being high atop that list.

E3 2013: Call of Duty: Ghosts – Diving Into the Campaign [IGN]