....“Early on – when we decided to make a sequel – Activision estimated out a ridiculous budget. And we were like: ‘No, we don’t need that’,” he said. Though Bowling didn’t go into numbers, his description of the handsome budget is a telling sign of how important the franchise is to Activision. He added, however, that Infinity Ward was typically “pretty tight” with its development budgets.
Bowling was philosophical on the value of high budgets, discussing how they can even impede on the development process:
“Much like we don’t let ourselves get distracted by hype, if you have excess you feel like you should use excess,” he said. “So we said ‘let us design a game the way we’d always design a game. And let us focus on that.’ So we didn’t let the budget affect our mentality. We would only put stuff in the game that is right for the game, and not because we can.”