The Treyarch game that redefined WW2 | World at War Retrospective

Call of Duty: World at War is arguably the last of the good World War 2 shooters: at least when it comes to the singleplayer campaign side of things. During a period of time that witnessed a mass exodus away from the setting towards the much more popular Modern Military Shooter market popularised by Infinity Ward, Treyarch's final dip into the deadliest conflict in human history nonetheless managed to recapture our attention one final time.
In this video, I look into the changing landscape of first person shooter games leading up to the release of World at War, answering the question of how this game was able to succeed despite the massive influence of Modern Warfare.
References:
Call of Duty 4 Postmortem (Game Developer - March, 2008 Issue) Zied Rieke and Michael Boon interview.
Online version available at www.gamedeveloper.com/busines...
Call of Duty: World at War Interview (VideoGamer - June 22, 2008) Wesley Yin-Poole interviewing Noah Heller and Rich Farrelly.
www.videogamer.com/previews/c...
Official Xbox Magazine Issue 86 (August, 2008) Ryan McCaffrey.
CoD:WaW Interview Mark Lamia From Treyarch On New Features (September 27, 2008) EverythingCallOfDuty KZbin Channel.
• CoD:WaW Interview Mark...
CoD: World At War - fear, familiarity and the moral conflict (The Guardian - November 19, 2008) Article by Keith Stuart.
www.theguardian.com/technolog...
Behind the Music of Call of Duty: World at War (Music4Games - December 5, 2008) Interview with Sean Murray by Alex Van Zelfden.
web.archive.org/web/200812191...
Aesthetics of World at War (Face Full of Eyes - March 11, 2021)
• Aesthetics of World at...
Activision Blames Disappointing Call Of Duty Sales On World War II (Kotaku - May 3, 2022) by Ethan Gach.
kotaku.com/activision-call-du...
Additional Sources:
Call of Duty: A short history: microsites.ign.com/call-of-du...
Call of Duty World at War Developer Insights | Exclusive Interview with Treyarch: • Call of Duty World at ...
Call of Duty: World at War announced: www.engadget.com/2008-06-09-c...
Quality Time with Hutch - Interview with Vahn from Treyarch (Part 1): • ARCHIVE: Quality Time ...
0:00 The B Studio
6:44 Ch 1 | Pre-release
10:36 Ch 2 | Pacific Campaign
19:24 Ch 3 | Eastern Front Campaign
26:05 Ch 4 | Original Soundtrack
32:25 Ch 4 (Pt 2) | RAWK
38:23 Ch 5 | Campaign Conclusion
40:06 Ch 6 | Additional Mentions
43:18 Conclusion

[@salmomin9351]

This is the best treyarch cod and I'm willing to die on this hill

[@Harvey-krishna]

Me and u both

[@jordonsky]

I agree

[@zemanishere]

I’m bound to die on a hot take hill and this is the only one I’m gonna defend

[@paxluporum4447]

This is undisputed. It's amazing.

[@damiann2496]

Same brotha

[@NILEGOD.777]

Thank you for mentioning the soundtrack to this game. No one really mentions how unique it was to include traditional acoustic instruments with industrial synths and percussion which you don't really see outside the realm of Trent Reznor and a select few industrial artists

[@Steven-cf1ty]

I still remember my first playthrough of WaW as a kid. The first Soviet level still stands out in my memories as the most iconic cod level ever. The grim tone and the faster pace gameplay in a ww2 game was something I wasn't expecting after playing the PS2 games and black ops 1. WW2 just got burned in my head as a pretty cool setting and Vietnam was the scary jungle place, and by the time Reznov starts killing POWs its really something crazy if your experience with ww2 Soviet games is Cod Finest Hour as a kid too young to really understand that wars aren't good guys beating up bad guys.

[@Gibby42069]

The fact that the opening is historically accurate is wild

[@piotrmontgomerytv7786]

Opening, closing fans cutscenes are all 100% accurate. Like only innacuracies in the game are in Vendetta mission(excluding Ray Gun) we had king tiger tanks in Stalingrad and something wrong with iron aim on mosin apparently idk that was a historian pointing it out. Well, but does game have to be accurate to be good? No. It is like movie 300 historically innacurate but good. Also Tiger 2 in Stalingrad was pretty much the only innacuracy I spotted in WaW.

[@Gibby42069]

@@piotrmontgomerytv7786 huh?

[@patrickbrown897]

Actually the tactics being used early in the Japanese campaign is accurate, bonzai charges only occurred at the beginning of the war, since Japanese leadership realized after a couple massacred that they don't work. The way the combat plays out is surprisingly accurate to the tactics of the time, and the usage of those tactics in the real life timeline of the war.

[@plaguedoctorjamespainshe6009]

The industrial metal fits so much with the second world war Not only industry played an extremely important aspect to the war But we can also examine how the human cost in this war and the extermination had an industrial quality to it Specially, well, with the Holocaust

[@yourmanjimbo1302]

Great vid. Minor point I would add is that your choices in the Soviet campaign do make a slight difference at the end. At the beginning of the final mission, an excerpt of Chernov’s diary is read. If you didn’t kill any wounded Germans or the ones at the end of Eviction, Chernov writes that he respects your mercy and sees you as a real hero. If you did the opposite, he calls you brutal and no hero. If you alternated between mercy and revenge he doesn’t know what to make of you. It’s a minor thing, but it is a conclusion to the attempts at ‘moral choices’ throughout the Soviet campaign. Totally agree on the points about the music btw.

[@shuritgaming8038]

Man, when i beat the game as a kid and zombies started ,that scared the shit out of me 😂❤

[@botluckproductions]

I remember in school played as though they had p90s and I said I had a ppsh. They said I was old school. They were playing Modern Warfare, I was playing World at War.

[@FjongFleron]

this retrospective really reminds me why this is one of my favorite games of all time. your really managing to bring out the same mix of emotions i get from the game. fucking masterclass mate!

[@bloodysimile4893]

World at War that show the horror of war without beating you on the head of it. The jungle warfare fighting the Japanese with desperate to just survive. Then USSR where you can feel the overwhelming need to fight for the motherland to drive the dagger into the heart of Germany. I'm sure Dimitri return home with a hero welcome.

[@blazelightzero595]

One aspect of World at War's presentation that I feel goes unmentioned in retrospectives like this is its use of splicing real world footage into the cutscenes. It's a quirk unique to Treyarch COD games that helps blur the lines between what's fictional in-game to the real world atrocities committed in this war. It is another element of this game's tone that accentuates the horror portrayed during gameplay and makes the whole experience feel like a snuff film on top of maintaining the player's intrigue apart from the static mission briefings of Infinity Ward's entries. It's truly impressive how they managed to effortlessly weave those snippets of real life into the game.

[@historyben7122]

I like this channel - basically running through every game from my formative years

[@yourmanjimbo1302]

Very excited for another in depth vid of yours, I loved the endwar and WIC vids

[@ThommyofThenn]

10:16 I dont remember being impressed by that menu as a lad. As an experienced gamer today, I come to this scene and it reminds me of the Postal 1 menu! That harsh, dischordant noise instead of the sappy strings or martial snare drums that I associated with WW2 games. For example Medal of Honor Allied Assault, one of my favourite WW2 fps titles but it has to be said, the menu had the snare drums!

[@CrispyHulk1]

Such beautifully created and distinct game. Carefully designed with art style and music

[@starfall631]

Yes, yes, yes i totally agree!!!!(haven't passed the 2 second mark)

[@Saniteee]

I remember being young and having my granny after school getting upset with the gore and violence in video games I would play for an hour or two when getting home but once WaW came out and I was killing nazi zombies she was a little more lenient 😂

[@freXampl]

I've been waiting for this.

[@unitedfront9717]

Another banger from our second favourite Hub

[@thelostvoyager7026]

Another Banger 🎉🎉🎉

[@BHuang92]

Best CoD game ever! *And I will die on that hill*

[@beegdonkey5750]

Great video, I been on a cod binge lately so would love if you made more videos on the series. Although the best ones are the earlier games on pc. Cod 1 and its expansion, 2, 4, this game, mw2, and finally black ops 1. After that the pc ports sucked

[@CreamFacial]

Hell yes, another Face Full of Eyes advert. God bless.

[@scavmerchanthub]

Wait till you see the rawk chapter 😭

[@CreamFacial]

HAHAHAHAHAH

[@CreamFacial]

@@scavmerchanthub I am so glad that KZbin recommended me your channel last year. Keep up the great videos man, looking forward to the next one :D

[@Theofiilus2978]

I was 12 when waw came out. I saw the first mission when my brother played it. Only the opening scene gave me an awe already. The multiplayer doesn't look as good as MW but i bet it was good one. I didn't get to play it myself because it wouldn't have run on family computer and my brother kept his computer just for him understandably. I was stuck on my PS2 at that time.

[@FPSWreck]

This video is a banger

[@ivandesiigner]

I know the choice the game give you on the metro entrance doesn't matter at all but I found very confusing that if you kill the soldiers by burning them is considered the one chernov influenced us to do, the one guy that is the most pacifist or at least he tried to, and if we shoot them or mercy kill them then is the one influenced by reznov the guy who just wants to see them suffer, quite strange was it on purpose was an error or did I misunderstand?

[@ivandesiigner]

I might've misunderstand something here, I never played this game before so I know nothing about the characters and story here.

[@yourmanjimbo1302]

I think if you refuse to do anything to them (and have the other soviets kill them with molotovs) that’s the pacifist Chernov choice. If you gun them down, that’s the bloodthirsty Reznov choice. I guess the moral is that you personally should not engage in senseless violence, even if they are going to die anyway

[@DogeickBateman]

@@ivandesiigner What the skibidi

[@iamwrong2239]

Damn, what an amazing video. Although I will say, just because they wanted to be more gritty with how they presented WW2, that doesn't mean its historically accurate. You may be correct in thinking this is dumb of me to point out, but I also want to remind of the brain rot that is Tik Tok and, in general, the internet. You should go find some WW2 focused channels if you are interested in learning more about WW2 or wait for Wendigoon to drop his very long WW2 video that he plans on doing but I'm not sure if he is still doing it or has decided to do something else entirely

[@jordonsky]

We need world at war remasterd on ps4 ps5 and the x boxes and pc

[@Gucci_Nomad]

25:42 even reznov knew

[@AceTankerHD2]

WaW has to be the greatest CoD I’ve played.

[@HiHowAreYaaaa]

World at War is an underrated masterpiece

[@redaug4212]

World at war is ridiculously overrated. There's a new video essay about it every month.

[@youvebeengreeked]

This is the greatest FPS game of all time. Simple.

[@iniguezawsome]

Love FFOE but yeah I agree

[@J4XJ3T]

This is cod at its best

[@baconcurtain5089]

Treyarch has carried Call Of Duty for the last 15 years and I love it

[@ThommyofThenn]

17:44 Incorrect wording; they are no weebs as the katana is a time-honoured part of their culture 17:22 wouldnt it make sense for them to fight harder out of rage due to seeing their leader buy the farm? As a way of avenging him and expressing extremely intense reaction

[@ArkMagician]

Why did I see skibidid toilet

[@thewintereaglefly]

Random rob scallon moment

[@redaug4212]

Another 45 minute video essay glazing World at War... Daring today, aren't we?

[@gavinrobinson2270]

kzbin.info/www/bejne/b6LPYWuBgJV6apI

[@plaguedoctorjamespainshe6009]

World at War is the only CoD i like The soviet campaing specially Even tho i really dislike how they really really really try to make the soviets as bad as the nazis Like I'm sorry They are literal Nazis who engaged in a genocidal campaing against eastern europe and by the time the Soviet union was in Seelow heights they already discovered the Holocaust, that the genocide wasn't "only" against the soviet communists and slavic people But the jews, the gypsies, and so on They knew about the concentration camps, about the extermination camps, the guettos, they suffered first hand the genocide of the fascists, with 20 million plus sovietd dying So like No They aren't equal I ain't feeling bad or sympathy for any SS or wermacht soldier who carried all the Holocaust "Oh but they commited war crimes and were really brutal" as if the other allies didn't engaged in the same time of brutality Specially the atomic bombings wich were completely unnecessary And guess what No allied war crime comes close to what the axis, be it nazi Germany or imperial Japan did This game tried to do an classic anti soviet propaganda but accidentally made the most based pro Soviet propaganda ever