The Call of Duty series hasn’t always been known as a technical showpiece on consoles but it has hit the magical 60 frames per second number that fuels its hectic fast-paced gameplay very well, so when changing generations people began to wonder where the series could go with a bit more power to use. Call of Duty Ghosts on the next generation of consoles is a slightly cleaner experience, but that’s about it.
A lot of games making the jump to next-gen are using the 60 fps footnote as the big thing that they are doing to showcase the new technology. Call of Duty has hit 60 for a few years now, so that’s not something they can tout as a new feature. The other half of that feature list is hitting 1080p resolution, something Call of Duty has never done (it’s typically around 640p on Xbox 360 and PS3). On PlayStation 4 the game finally hits the 1080p number (720p on Xbox One) and it does make quite the difference from a gameplay perspective. Everything just looks cleaner. Textures look more crisp, it’s easier to spot enemies in the distance, it really does help. When taking a look at both the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 4 versions of Ghosts you don’t see a whole lot of change graphically, but the resolution bump alone makes the PS4 version a much better experience. The Xbox One version looks nicer too, but less impressive at 720p.
As far as everything else in Call of Duty: Ghosts goes, there aren’t many astounding changes between the two versions. As with other cross-generation franchises the biggest leaps will likely come when the Xbox 360 and PS3 versions can stop being made, which for Call of Duty might be more than a few years. I am slightly disappointed that there isn’t more of a difference between the two being that games like Assassin’s Creed IV have noticeable improvements from old to next generation, but Infinity Ward likely had their hands full trying to get Ghosts done in the small time-frame they are given for the titles.
The conclusion to draw from this comparison is that the next generation version of Call of Duty: Ghosts is the best version, and the PS4 version is the best on top of that. If you have the next-gen systems get that version. This is likely the case for most games that straddled the line between last and the now current generation, so you’ll see no difference here. I just hope that in the next CoD game there are far more noticeable improvements that utilize all the power the developers now hold.