Call Of Duty: Black OPs 2 (trailer inside)
- Thread starter mrtonguetwista
- Start date
Black Ops 2 spans decades, offers branching missions and choice
Garnering legions of fans tends to wedge a franchise right between those that crave more of the same content, and those that loathe its existence. Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 is in the same spot, but developer Treyarch is looking to create some wiggle room between the two camps in its next contribution to Activision's billion dollar franchise.
At Treyarch's office in Los Angeles, company boss Mark Lamia steps into a darkened theater filled with journalists. He's chipper, excited to finally talk about the game his team has been slaving over for more than a year. Despite a tightly constructed marketing schedule, the secret of Black Ops 2 was hard to contain; its existence began to leak in January.
"Let me introduce you to the worst kept secret in the game industry," Lamia says as he walks in front of a giant screen embellished with the sleek Black Ops 2 logo. The walls around the screen are lined with concept art, some of it modeled after surveillance photos from in-orbit satellites, but all with a futuristic tint to them. "Saying that," Lamia continues, "we think what Black Ops 2 is about is one of the best kept secrets in the industry."
Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 (5/1/2012)
As implied by the early marketing, Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 thrusts the franchise into the near future. But this isn't Halo or Battlefield 2142 – this is a future that isn't as far off as we may think, and it's not the period of time gamers will be visiting when the game launches this November.
"This is a direct sequel to Black Ops," Lamia says, adding that one of the central characters from the previous installment, Sgt. Frank Woods, is alive and well in the sequel. Rather than lead off from the previous game, Black Ops 2 will feature two distinct time periods: the 1980s vintage Cold War, and a grounded future in which the United States and China are embroiled in a new Cold War. The idea, Lamia admits, is to show some parity between both periods and allow players to get a better glimpse into the characters involved. Technology and the reasons for battle change, but the objective remains the same: win at all costs.
In Black Ops 2 players will play as former protagonist Alex Mason in the 1980s, and as his son, David Mason, in 2025. The two periods are entwined with the return of Woods and a new villain, Raoul Menendez. The story arc spans the Mason family and Woods, and plot out the rise and fall of Menendez. Working with David S. Goyer, who helped co-develop the story for The Dark Knight, Treyarch has decided to shine a more detailed light on its villain. Players will see the breaking point for Menendez in the 1980s to better understand his motivations for terror in the future. We see a man go from good soldier to bitter terrorist, and his story is as important to the entire plot of Black Ops 2 as any other character we meet. "It's a character study. It's a story about these characters," Lamia explains to me later.
It's Menendez's actions that throw the United States and China into a chaotic war. A cyber attack cripples the China Stock Exchange, which leads the country to horde a precious material that is making headlines in real life today.
Though control of the world's oil reserves continues to be the source of tension today, the future battle for resources in Black Ops 2 revolves around Rare Earth Materials. Rare Earths are a combination of minerals used to create everything from smart phones, laptops, and earth-conscious, wind-powered generators. It's also a central component in the creation of weapons: guided missiles, drones, and more rely on these rare earths.
President Barack Obama was recently in the news stating that the U.S., European Union, and Japan will bring a case against China to the World Trade Organization because of the nation's export restrictions on the material. China, according to multiple reports, produces over 95 percent of all rare earths. In Black Ops 2, the stock exchange incident, which traces back to the United States, offers the perfect excuse for China to keep the materials to itself.
Remember those 'Choose Your Own Adventure' books? That's sort of the idea we have here.
- Dave Anthony, Game Director
According to Lamia, Black Ops 2 comes from a team that has worked together for an extended period of time, where comfort levels and success allow them to challenge assumptions and deliver something they believe can push the franchise forward. This leads to one of the most interesting changes since Infinity Ward took the franchise to the modern era: branching stories.
Throughout the campaign, players will be given the choice to take part in 'Strike Force' missions, with a key objective that can shift the landscape of the greater battle between China and the United States. Sometimes multiple missions will be available, but only one can be selected. Based on the success or failure of these missions -- and you can actually fail to accomplish your objective -- the campaign story will change. There are also choices within levels. In a mission shown at the event, players were given the choice between covering their team with a sniper rifle from a perch, or hitting the ground alongside their squad. According to Lamia, player choice can also lead to the death of key characters during the campaign.
"Remember those 'Choose Your Own Adventure' books?" game director Dave Anthony asks the room, "that's sort of the idea we have here." It seems crazy Treyarch would spend time and resources to create levels players may never see during a single playthrough, but it's extraordinarily ambitious and an idea that intrigues me.
Setting the majority of the game in 2025 doesn't mean Treyarch will showcase a war of laser guns and giant mech suits. The conceit in Black Ops 2 is that technology has continued to grow and the military has better embraced the use of drones on the battlefield. Many of the concepts featured in Black Ops 2 are taking existing technology and increasing its ferociousness, or shrinking it down to size.
In another mission, Los Angeles has been ravaged by unmanned attack drones. David Mason and his partner, Harper, are tasked with escorting the President of the United States when their convoy is attacked by a fleet of these drones. Here we're introduced to a new piece of gear: a scope with the same ability as the full-body scanner found in modern airports.
"The military has something like this now, except it's this huge rig on a truck," Lamia tells me, describing an area scanner that takes a three-hundred-and-sixty degree image, revealing everything within nearby structures and underground. It's this giant prototype that has been shrunk down into the scope in Black Ops 2, allowing players to see through structures and spot hiding enemies. It's certainly future technology, but it could be within the realm of possibility in the next decade.
Former Pentagon employee and author Peter W. Singer, whose book Wired For War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Century outlines the military's change in attitude toward unmanned technology in recent history, is helping Treyarch keep the future setting grounded in reality. "In some cases he told us we didn't go far enough," Lamia explains after I ask him about concepts that seemed too futuristic to be included in the game. But will war ever escalate to call for the amount of drones and machines seen in the Black Ops 2 trailer? "When U.S. forces went into Iraq, the original invasion had zero robotic systems on the ground," Singer wrote in 2009's Wired For War. "By the end of 2006, it had reached the 5,000 mark and growing. It was projected to reach as high as 12,000 by the end of 2008."
To keep things even, and to show off the near-future technology Treyarch has added to Call of Duty, Black Ops 2 multiplayer will take place exclusively in 2025. Though the developer wouldn't go into detail on the franchise's most important component, game design director David Vonderhaar noted it was important for the team to strip the entire multiplayer down to the most important pieces, to ensure Black Ops 2 would have the "best gameplay system that you can have, period." Two multiplayer maps were shown: a destroyed downtown Los Angeles map called 'Aftermath' and a map called 'Yemen,' set in a deserted island town. A more detailed multiplayer reveal is expected later this year.
Zombies, of course, will also return, but those are timeless creatures. The only shred of info revealed for the returning mode is that Treyarch will now present it within the multiplayer engine, making it easier to take advantage of certain elements found in that mode.
Call of Duty detractors may complain the series hasn't evolved enough over time, but Black Ops 2 may change things. The developers at Treyarch, from what I've seen, are doing what they can to make this a unique experience for fans – and perhaps garner the interest of people outside that huge group. The studio certainly has the ability to rise to the challenge, so we'll be keeping a close eye on Black Ops 2 as the game's November 13 release date inches closer.
http://www.joystiq.com/2012/05/02/black-ops-2-spans-decades-offers-branching-missions-and-choice/
Garnering legions of fans tends to wedge a franchise right between those that crave more of the same content, and those that loathe its existence. Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 is in the same spot, but developer Treyarch is looking to create some wiggle room between the two camps in its next contribution to Activision's billion dollar franchise.
At Treyarch's office in Los Angeles, company boss Mark Lamia steps into a darkened theater filled with journalists. He's chipper, excited to finally talk about the game his team has been slaving over for more than a year. Despite a tightly constructed marketing schedule, the secret of Black Ops 2 was hard to contain; its existence began to leak in January.
"Let me introduce you to the worst kept secret in the game industry," Lamia says as he walks in front of a giant screen embellished with the sleek Black Ops 2 logo. The walls around the screen are lined with concept art, some of it modeled after surveillance photos from in-orbit satellites, but all with a futuristic tint to them. "Saying that," Lamia continues, "we think what Black Ops 2 is about is one of the best kept secrets in the industry."
Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 (5/1/2012)
As implied by the early marketing, Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 thrusts the franchise into the near future. But this isn't Halo or Battlefield 2142 – this is a future that isn't as far off as we may think, and it's not the period of time gamers will be visiting when the game launches this November.
"This is a direct sequel to Black Ops," Lamia says, adding that one of the central characters from the previous installment, Sgt. Frank Woods, is alive and well in the sequel. Rather than lead off from the previous game, Black Ops 2 will feature two distinct time periods: the 1980s vintage Cold War, and a grounded future in which the United States and China are embroiled in a new Cold War. The idea, Lamia admits, is to show some parity between both periods and allow players to get a better glimpse into the characters involved. Technology and the reasons for battle change, but the objective remains the same: win at all costs.
In Black Ops 2 players will play as former protagonist Alex Mason in the 1980s, and as his son, David Mason, in 2025. The two periods are entwined with the return of Woods and a new villain, Raoul Menendez. The story arc spans the Mason family and Woods, and plot out the rise and fall of Menendez. Working with David S. Goyer, who helped co-develop the story for The Dark Knight, Treyarch has decided to shine a more detailed light on its villain. Players will see the breaking point for Menendez in the 1980s to better understand his motivations for terror in the future. We see a man go from good soldier to bitter terrorist, and his story is as important to the entire plot of Black Ops 2 as any other character we meet. "It's a character study. It's a story about these characters," Lamia explains to me later.
It's Menendez's actions that throw the United States and China into a chaotic war. A cyber attack cripples the China Stock Exchange, which leads the country to horde a precious material that is making headlines in real life today.
Though control of the world's oil reserves continues to be the source of tension today, the future battle for resources in Black Ops 2 revolves around Rare Earth Materials. Rare Earths are a combination of minerals used to create everything from smart phones, laptops, and earth-conscious, wind-powered generators. It's also a central component in the creation of weapons: guided missiles, drones, and more rely on these rare earths.
President Barack Obama was recently in the news stating that the U.S., European Union, and Japan will bring a case against China to the World Trade Organization because of the nation's export restrictions on the material. China, according to multiple reports, produces over 95 percent of all rare earths. In Black Ops 2, the stock exchange incident, which traces back to the United States, offers the perfect excuse for China to keep the materials to itself.
Remember those 'Choose Your Own Adventure' books? That's sort of the idea we have here.
- Dave Anthony, Game Director
According to Lamia, Black Ops 2 comes from a team that has worked together for an extended period of time, where comfort levels and success allow them to challenge assumptions and deliver something they believe can push the franchise forward. This leads to one of the most interesting changes since Infinity Ward took the franchise to the modern era: branching stories.
Throughout the campaign, players will be given the choice to take part in 'Strike Force' missions, with a key objective that can shift the landscape of the greater battle between China and the United States. Sometimes multiple missions will be available, but only one can be selected. Based on the success or failure of these missions -- and you can actually fail to accomplish your objective -- the campaign story will change. There are also choices within levels. In a mission shown at the event, players were given the choice between covering their team with a sniper rifle from a perch, or hitting the ground alongside their squad. According to Lamia, player choice can also lead to the death of key characters during the campaign.
"Remember those 'Choose Your Own Adventure' books?" game director Dave Anthony asks the room, "that's sort of the idea we have here." It seems crazy Treyarch would spend time and resources to create levels players may never see during a single playthrough, but it's extraordinarily ambitious and an idea that intrigues me.
Setting the majority of the game in 2025 doesn't mean Treyarch will showcase a war of laser guns and giant mech suits. The conceit in Black Ops 2 is that technology has continued to grow and the military has better embraced the use of drones on the battlefield. Many of the concepts featured in Black Ops 2 are taking existing technology and increasing its ferociousness, or shrinking it down to size.
In another mission, Los Angeles has been ravaged by unmanned attack drones. David Mason and his partner, Harper, are tasked with escorting the President of the United States when their convoy is attacked by a fleet of these drones. Here we're introduced to a new piece of gear: a scope with the same ability as the full-body scanner found in modern airports.
"The military has something like this now, except it's this huge rig on a truck," Lamia tells me, describing an area scanner that takes a three-hundred-and-sixty degree image, revealing everything within nearby structures and underground. It's this giant prototype that has been shrunk down into the scope in Black Ops 2, allowing players to see through structures and spot hiding enemies. It's certainly future technology, but it could be within the realm of possibility in the next decade.
Former Pentagon employee and author Peter W. Singer, whose book Wired For War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Century outlines the military's change in attitude toward unmanned technology in recent history, is helping Treyarch keep the future setting grounded in reality. "In some cases he told us we didn't go far enough," Lamia explains after I ask him about concepts that seemed too futuristic to be included in the game. But will war ever escalate to call for the amount of drones and machines seen in the Black Ops 2 trailer? "When U.S. forces went into Iraq, the original invasion had zero robotic systems on the ground," Singer wrote in 2009's Wired For War. "By the end of 2006, it had reached the 5,000 mark and growing. It was projected to reach as high as 12,000 by the end of 2008."
To keep things even, and to show off the near-future technology Treyarch has added to Call of Duty, Black Ops 2 multiplayer will take place exclusively in 2025. Though the developer wouldn't go into detail on the franchise's most important component, game design director David Vonderhaar noted it was important for the team to strip the entire multiplayer down to the most important pieces, to ensure Black Ops 2 would have the "best gameplay system that you can have, period." Two multiplayer maps were shown: a destroyed downtown Los Angeles map called 'Aftermath' and a map called 'Yemen,' set in a deserted island town. A more detailed multiplayer reveal is expected later this year.
Zombies, of course, will also return, but those are timeless creatures. The only shred of info revealed for the returning mode is that Treyarch will now present it within the multiplayer engine, making it easier to take advantage of certain elements found in that mode.
Call of Duty detractors may complain the series hasn't evolved enough over time, but Black Ops 2 may change things. The developers at Treyarch, from what I've seen, are doing what they can to make this a unique experience for fans – and perhaps garner the interest of people outside that huge group. The studio certainly has the ability to rise to the challenge, so we'll be keeping a close eye on Black Ops 2 as the game's November 13 release date inches closer.
http://www.joystiq.com/2012/05/02/black-ops-2-spans-decades-offers-branching-missions-and-choice/
The Story
The game's story will jump between two timelines, with the primary one set in 2025. "Most" of the game will be set in 2025.
It is a direct sequel to Black Ops.
We will find out definitively what happened at the end of Black Ops—presumably, Mason didn't actually kill JFK, given that he's out in the field in Black Ops II. But who knows?
The second timeline will be set in the late 80's near the end of the Cold War.
The story will be narrated by Black Ops character Frank Woods, now an old man. Apparently he didn't die at the end of Black Ops after all.
In the 80's timeline, players will take on the role of Black Ops protagonist Alex Mason.
In 2025, players will take on the role of David Mason, who is the son of Alex Mason. The father/son relationship will play a part in the story. Hello daddening of video games!
In the game's fiction, there is a second Cold War happening between China and the US due to the scarcity of Rare Earth Elements used to make tech devices and military weapons.
The story is based on a real-world possibility, as China (according to the folks at Treyarch) currently controls 95% of the rare earth elements in the world. Topical!
Many of the real-world hooks are inspired by P.W. Singer's Wired for War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Century.
A good deal of the 1980's action will take place during proxy wars in Central America. Tropical!
48 Things That You Should Know About Call of Duty: Black Ops II
Game Director Dave Anthony hinted that we may find out more about "imaginary" Viktor Reznov. "He was essentially a figment of the player's imagination," Anthony said.
"Or was he?" Studio Director Mark Lamia chimed in, playfully. "Will we find out more about that?" asked Anthony with a smirk.
David Mason (the son)'s callsign is "Section." Which is kind of a cool callsign.
The villain will be a man named Raul Menendez, who in 2025 is pitting the Chinese and US governments against each other by hacking into their drones and other robotic weapons.
The 1980's missions will chronicle what started Menendez on setting his current-day plans in motion.
The story is was written from the ground up by Dark Knight and Batman Begins co-writer David Goyer. Goyer joined the first Black Ops part of the way through. He wanted to "create a memorable villain" with Martinez.
Martinez has hacked into the US's unmanned drones and unleashed an attack on Los Angeles. In the mission we saw, a fleet of drones were destroying buildings in downtown LA.
There will be at least one female soldier in the game, a pilot named Anderson. She laid quite a bit of waste during the entire LA mission.
The president in 2025 is also a woman, and appeared in the LA mission.
David Mason's sidekick is a soldier named Nelson who appears to be played by Michael Rooker of Mallrats and The Walking Dead fame.
The game will be using full-body performance capture to place its actors in the game; the tech demo I saw demonstrated both male and female actors captured with the sort of clarity we've come to expect from games using full-performance capture. James Burns will be reprising his role as Frank Woods, of course.
The Gameplay
From what I saw in several demo sections set in a burning, futuristic LA, drones are controllable in combat and will play a large part in the game. Players have a drone-controller on their wrist in the game, and can use it to assign targets and waypoints.
There will be horses, and horseback-riding, during at least one sequence in the 1980's. They even went so far as to bring a horse into the motion capture studio.
At one point in the demo, the player jumped into a futuristic anti-aircraft gun and shot down enemy drones.
Vehicle segments will be back, including one piloting a futuristic VTOL airship. Part of the VTOL mission was mostly on-rails, but the second part involved free-flying and dogfighting with drones.
The Black Ops II story will be branching—it will feature choices and variable outcomes. Wait, what? Yep.
At one point, players had an option to either grab a sniper rifle and cover their squad, or rappel down to join up with them. Presumably that choice leads to a slightly different gameplay experience—this looks like one of the smaller of the choices offered in the game.
A large part of the branching will be due to Strike Force, which is a brand-new game mode featuring tactical, open-ended gameplay in sandbox-style levels.
The New Game Mode: "Strike Force"
Strike Force missions will be woven into the core single-player campaign, and will present themselves as various black ops missions available around the globe.
Players won't be able to play all of the strike force missions in a single playthrough.
Strike Force is currently only included in the campaign and isn't a separate mode. It won't allow for multiplayer but, at some point down the road, could be fleshed out. "Things like Zombies originally started as unlocks," said an Activision representative after we followed up to make sure. "We're not taking the option off the table."
Depending on the outcome of a given strike force mission, the story will change. "You're going to choose a mission," said Lamia, "and that's a branch for the story. Say there's three missions out there—you're not going to go back and play all of them; the story goes on. If you die on a strike force mission, you die in the story."
Going on that, it would seem that the playable characters don't feature in the Strike Force missions.
Strike Force allows players to control squads of troops, giving follow/hold commands with the shoulder buttons.
Strike Force also allows a zoomed-out command view via an unmanned aerial drone that lets you to set waypoints for your units to achieve shifting goals.
Strike Force will allow you to control (at the very least) armed aerial drones, armed land-drones, and unarmed aerial drones in addition to being able to hop to the viewpoint of any of the soldiers in your squad.
The strike force missions will unfold organically but will be written into the story—in that way, they'll function somewhat like a single-player version of the multiplayer in Mass Effect 3.
I think I heard Kiefer Sutherland voicing one of the squad members in Strike Force, but I'm not sure. Consider this a Kiefer! Rumor!
Multiplayer
Multiplayer director David Vonderhart relayed that the new approach they are taking is "One size does not fit all." That means, he said, that there is no one way to play a Call of Duty game. So, they're pulling back features like create-a-class, killstreaks, and other features and reexamining them, challenging their assumptions of "what cows are sacred."
Multiplayer will take place entirely in the year 2025—there will be no multiplayer missions set in the 80's.
They are taking the E-sports community very seriously. In part, that means that they're focusing on making the game more fun to watch as a spectator. Hopefully that means super cute, colorful uniforms!
Online Director Dan Bunting took us through a tech demo of the upgraded graphics; while lighting upgrades and tech aren't usually the most interesting topics, what they were showing looked great. As they put it, they are aiming for "PC quality graphics running at 60 FPS on a console." The illusion was quite convincing.
We saw two unpopulated multiplayer maps: The first map we saw was a naturalistic map located in a village in Yemen.
The second map was called "Aftermath" and was set in a ruined downtown LA, presumably after the drone-attack that we saw in the demo.
Zombies
Zombies will definitely be back in Black Ops II, and will feature all new modes that are more fleshed-out than ever.
"There will be more zombies and more modes; just more."
The zombies are "In the multiplayer engine." "If you think about all of the things we can do with our multiplayer engine," Lamia said, "You can start to think about how we might be looking at this." Okay then!
Zombies are the only confirmed co-op aspect of Black Ops II. The campaign and strike-force modes do not appear to feature co-op.
The game's story will jump between two timelines, with the primary one set in 2025. "Most" of the game will be set in 2025.
It is a direct sequel to Black Ops.
We will find out definitively what happened at the end of Black Ops—presumably, Mason didn't actually kill JFK, given that he's out in the field in Black Ops II. But who knows?
The second timeline will be set in the late 80's near the end of the Cold War.
The story will be narrated by Black Ops character Frank Woods, now an old man. Apparently he didn't die at the end of Black Ops after all.
In the 80's timeline, players will take on the role of Black Ops protagonist Alex Mason.
In 2025, players will take on the role of David Mason, who is the son of Alex Mason. The father/son relationship will play a part in the story. Hello daddening of video games!
In the game's fiction, there is a second Cold War happening between China and the US due to the scarcity of Rare Earth Elements used to make tech devices and military weapons.
The story is based on a real-world possibility, as China (according to the folks at Treyarch) currently controls 95% of the rare earth elements in the world. Topical!
Many of the real-world hooks are inspired by P.W. Singer's Wired for War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Century.
A good deal of the 1980's action will take place during proxy wars in Central America. Tropical!
48 Things That You Should Know About Call of Duty: Black Ops II
Game Director Dave Anthony hinted that we may find out more about "imaginary" Viktor Reznov. "He was essentially a figment of the player's imagination," Anthony said.
"Or was he?" Studio Director Mark Lamia chimed in, playfully. "Will we find out more about that?" asked Anthony with a smirk.
David Mason (the son)'s callsign is "Section." Which is kind of a cool callsign.
The villain will be a man named Raul Menendez, who in 2025 is pitting the Chinese and US governments against each other by hacking into their drones and other robotic weapons.
The 1980's missions will chronicle what started Menendez on setting his current-day plans in motion.
The story is was written from the ground up by Dark Knight and Batman Begins co-writer David Goyer. Goyer joined the first Black Ops part of the way through. He wanted to "create a memorable villain" with Martinez.
Martinez has hacked into the US's unmanned drones and unleashed an attack on Los Angeles. In the mission we saw, a fleet of drones were destroying buildings in downtown LA.
There will be at least one female soldier in the game, a pilot named Anderson. She laid quite a bit of waste during the entire LA mission.
The president in 2025 is also a woman, and appeared in the LA mission.
David Mason's sidekick is a soldier named Nelson who appears to be played by Michael Rooker of Mallrats and The Walking Dead fame.
The game will be using full-body performance capture to place its actors in the game; the tech demo I saw demonstrated both male and female actors captured with the sort of clarity we've come to expect from games using full-performance capture. James Burns will be reprising his role as Frank Woods, of course.
The Gameplay
From what I saw in several demo sections set in a burning, futuristic LA, drones are controllable in combat and will play a large part in the game. Players have a drone-controller on their wrist in the game, and can use it to assign targets and waypoints.
There will be horses, and horseback-riding, during at least one sequence in the 1980's. They even went so far as to bring a horse into the motion capture studio.
At one point in the demo, the player jumped into a futuristic anti-aircraft gun and shot down enemy drones.
Vehicle segments will be back, including one piloting a futuristic VTOL airship. Part of the VTOL mission was mostly on-rails, but the second part involved free-flying and dogfighting with drones.
The Black Ops II story will be branching—it will feature choices and variable outcomes. Wait, what? Yep.
At one point, players had an option to either grab a sniper rifle and cover their squad, or rappel down to join up with them. Presumably that choice leads to a slightly different gameplay experience—this looks like one of the smaller of the choices offered in the game.
A large part of the branching will be due to Strike Force, which is a brand-new game mode featuring tactical, open-ended gameplay in sandbox-style levels.
The New Game Mode: "Strike Force"
Strike Force missions will be woven into the core single-player campaign, and will present themselves as various black ops missions available around the globe.
Players won't be able to play all of the strike force missions in a single playthrough.
Strike Force is currently only included in the campaign and isn't a separate mode. It won't allow for multiplayer but, at some point down the road, could be fleshed out. "Things like Zombies originally started as unlocks," said an Activision representative after we followed up to make sure. "We're not taking the option off the table."
Depending on the outcome of a given strike force mission, the story will change. "You're going to choose a mission," said Lamia, "and that's a branch for the story. Say there's three missions out there—you're not going to go back and play all of them; the story goes on. If you die on a strike force mission, you die in the story."
Going on that, it would seem that the playable characters don't feature in the Strike Force missions.
Strike Force allows players to control squads of troops, giving follow/hold commands with the shoulder buttons.
Strike Force also allows a zoomed-out command view via an unmanned aerial drone that lets you to set waypoints for your units to achieve shifting goals.
Strike Force will allow you to control (at the very least) armed aerial drones, armed land-drones, and unarmed aerial drones in addition to being able to hop to the viewpoint of any of the soldiers in your squad.
The strike force missions will unfold organically but will be written into the story—in that way, they'll function somewhat like a single-player version of the multiplayer in Mass Effect 3.
I think I heard Kiefer Sutherland voicing one of the squad members in Strike Force, but I'm not sure. Consider this a Kiefer! Rumor!
Multiplayer
Multiplayer director David Vonderhart relayed that the new approach they are taking is "One size does not fit all." That means, he said, that there is no one way to play a Call of Duty game. So, they're pulling back features like create-a-class, killstreaks, and other features and reexamining them, challenging their assumptions of "what cows are sacred."
Multiplayer will take place entirely in the year 2025—there will be no multiplayer missions set in the 80's.
They are taking the E-sports community very seriously. In part, that means that they're focusing on making the game more fun to watch as a spectator. Hopefully that means super cute, colorful uniforms!
Online Director Dan Bunting took us through a tech demo of the upgraded graphics; while lighting upgrades and tech aren't usually the most interesting topics, what they were showing looked great. As they put it, they are aiming for "PC quality graphics running at 60 FPS on a console." The illusion was quite convincing.
We saw two unpopulated multiplayer maps: The first map we saw was a naturalistic map located in a village in Yemen.
The second map was called "Aftermath" and was set in a ruined downtown LA, presumably after the drone-attack that we saw in the demo.
Zombies
Zombies will definitely be back in Black Ops II, and will feature all new modes that are more fleshed-out than ever.
"There will be more zombies and more modes; just more."
The zombies are "In the multiplayer engine." "If you think about all of the things we can do with our multiplayer engine," Lamia said, "You can start to think about how we might be looking at this." Okay then!
Zombies are the only confirmed co-op aspect of Black Ops II. The campaign and strike-force modes do not appear to feature co-op.
Mark Lamia is starting to freak me out.
He's telling me about the future--or, specifically, he's talking about the future of warfare and how that plays into the scenario they're building for the campaign in Treyarch's next release, Call of Duty: Black Ops II. After talking to P.W. Singer, an author and director of an institution that gets paid to worry about such things, the team at Treyarch is building a plausible version of the year 2025. By spinning out from today's ideas about how wars are fought and the resource struggles likely to be causing problems by then, much of the next Call of Duty game is concerned with China's hold on rare earth elements, the 17 elements that go into making all sorts of modern devices, from your iPhone to the batteries in today's hybrid automobiles to, well, all sorts of high-tech military items. In fact, it's not hard to conduct a headline search or two and discover all types of talk about China's stranglehold on these increasingly vital substances, and it's even easier to find people talking about the eventuality of a new Cold War rising out of all this. And that's today. By 2025? Well... like I said, Treyarch's argument sounds pretty convincing.
It's funny, because I was prepared for this trip to be a sad confirmation of my expectations with regards to the future of the Call of Duty franchise. Or, more specifically, my interest in the future of the Call of Duty franchise. Over the past couple of years, Activision has published Call of Duty games that are positively competent. Fine games if you're into that sort of thing, but the last couple of years have really left me wondering if I was still a part of that group. It wasn't until I started thinking about writing this story, for example, that I decided to finally toss Modern Warfare 3 back in to download all the maps and stuff that had come as a part of the Call of Duty Elite subscription that I definitely wasn't using. And as far as the actual gameplay and multiplayer is concerned, I suppose I'm still on the fence. But after hearing Treyarch's pitch for its story and the sorts of things the studio has planned for Black Ops II's campaign, I'm definitely excited enough to look forward to seeing how the next chapter from Frank Woods, Alex Mason, and Jason Hudson. Their story, though, will play out in the 1980s.
The bulk of Black Ops II will put you in the boots of David Mason, son of Alex Mason, who ran the show in the previous game. The younger Mason is hunting down a bad guy by the name of Raoul Menendez, who first started stirring up trouble when Reagan was in office. The game will open with David Mason heading to a CIA facility known as "The Vault," where the agency keeps people who are too important or crazy to be walking around the streets. It's here where Mason finds Frank Woods and confronts him about his and Alex Mason's past with Menendez. This sends the game flashing back to "old" Cold War as you'll see 1980s Afghanistan and other hot spots that show you what the original Black Ops crew did after Vietnam. Rather than giving you all of the '80s stuff up front, the game will flash back and forth between the past and the future, where Menendez has become the type of action movie villain that would take control of the entire US drone fleet and turn it against both us and China.
So what will warfare look like in 2025? Well, for starters it'll look a whole lot nicer. Treyarch has put in a lot of work on the renderer, and overall, the whole game looks a lot sharper and more detailed, while still running at 60 frames per second. Facial animations looked especially nice, better showing off some of the performance capture that the team has been doing, which includes mocapping horses for that '80s Afghanistan level. But there are plenty of more futuristic things to deal with, as well. In 2025, unmanned drones will apparently rule the battlefield, giving you more targets to shoot at that aren't just your standard soldier. In the downtown Los Angeles level that was shown, Mason went up against the CLAW (Cognitive Land Assault Weapon), which looked like a big, bear-sized robot with a turret mounted on its back. You'll be able to get in on the action, too, by deploying quadcopters with extra-mini miniguns mounted on them. You'll be able to order your drones around a bit with new squad controls. Grenades also look a little different, so in Treyarch's future you'll be launching grenades out of an arm-mounted cannon.
OK, what's the other big knock against the Call of Duty franchise? Seriously, when you're on a message board talking mess about it, what's the thing that everyone brings up? Right, the scripted part where it's totally on-rails and almost completely out of your control. That part is also being addressed in a few ways, which means that Black Ops II will have a branching campaign with multiple outcomes--or at least varying shades of a similar outcome. It's hard to get a read on how different things will actually be in the final game. Some of these changes are extremely simple--for example, the Los Angeles mission has two on-screen icons at one point, allowing you to either rappel down from a broken freeway to help cover the President as she makes her way through an increasingly-hot battlefield or you can choose to stay up on the freeway and snipe as the rest of your crew covers her escape. That sniper rifle, by the way, can see targets through walls and penetrate cover via a charged-up shot that expends more ammo than a standard shot.
That's a minor change, obviously. But it gets bigger. Things you do in the game will impact the overall state of the United States' cold war with China as well as the level of success that Menendez achieves. Some of these changes will be choice-based, but others will hinge on player skill. The clearest example of that on display to us was a Strike Force mission, which takes the campaign in a pretty different direction. These missions are attached to the story, but put you in the role of a team of SEALs who are out to capture a set of objectives. How you achieve these objectives is sort of up to you, giving the game a bit of a sandbox vibe, but overall it looked like a multiplayer sort of map overhauled to give it a set of single-player objectives--points that need to be captured, and so on. If you like, you can stay in the role of a soldier and run around, just like any other Call of Duty game. But you can also pop out of that soldier and get above the battle in "overwatch" mode. From above, you can order your forces around the map like a mini-RTS or pop into any unit to take direct control. This means you can directly control quadcopters, assault drones, and other non-human units. If the unit you're controlling is destroyed, you'll have to find a new unit to control and play continues as normal. But here's the catch: if you run out of units, you fail the mission and the action continues on. Those SEALs didn't capture that objective, and that will have some sort of impact on the overall story. You'll certainly be able to take multiple attempts at the Strike Force scenarios in case you want to ensure a specific outcome, but the idea of hitting a fail state and continuing onward is pretty exciting. At the very least, it's definitely not something I was expecting to find in a Call of Duty game.
When you finish the campaign and see "your" ending, the game will give you some sort of indication as to the points in the game that put you on that course, with the goal being to drive people to play the campaign more than once to see what changes if you play it differently. Again, this isn't the sort of thing that is completely foreign to video games, but in the context of a Call of Duty game, it sounds pretty cool. That Los Angeles level also has you freely flying a VTOL jet in jet mode above downtown LA as you attempt to keep the hacked drones off of the President. It doesn't look like the sort of thing that turns the action into a full-on flight simulator, but it definitely looks more dynamic than some of the diversions that have popped up in previous COD games.
So what about the multiplayer? Other than confirming that all the MP will be set in 2025, they're not really talking about that right now. But the goal for the multiplayer team is to revisit every single system and rebuild any that need rebuilding. This sounds like it could be more than the typical annual shift in how the progression works and what sort of perks you can equip, but it's hard to say. The team is attempting to build a multiplayer game that allows the people who just want to get in and shoot stuff up with their friends to have a good time without alienating the budding professional crowd that wants to shoot people in the face at MLG events. Combat Training will return and Zombies will also return as its own full mode.
Without more hard details on how the multiplayer mode is coming along, it's hard to know if Black Ops II will recapture the hearts and minds of lapsed fans like myself. But I can definitely say that I'm very interested in seeing how Treyarch's campaign ideas play out. Unsurprisingly, we'll all be able to find out in November... assuming that some fiendish villain hasn't taken over or our own unmanned Predator drones and bombed us all back to the Stone Age before then, of course.
He's telling me about the future--or, specifically, he's talking about the future of warfare and how that plays into the scenario they're building for the campaign in Treyarch's next release, Call of Duty: Black Ops II. After talking to P.W. Singer, an author and director of an institution that gets paid to worry about such things, the team at Treyarch is building a plausible version of the year 2025. By spinning out from today's ideas about how wars are fought and the resource struggles likely to be causing problems by then, much of the next Call of Duty game is concerned with China's hold on rare earth elements, the 17 elements that go into making all sorts of modern devices, from your iPhone to the batteries in today's hybrid automobiles to, well, all sorts of high-tech military items. In fact, it's not hard to conduct a headline search or two and discover all types of talk about China's stranglehold on these increasingly vital substances, and it's even easier to find people talking about the eventuality of a new Cold War rising out of all this. And that's today. By 2025? Well... like I said, Treyarch's argument sounds pretty convincing.
It's funny, because I was prepared for this trip to be a sad confirmation of my expectations with regards to the future of the Call of Duty franchise. Or, more specifically, my interest in the future of the Call of Duty franchise. Over the past couple of years, Activision has published Call of Duty games that are positively competent. Fine games if you're into that sort of thing, but the last couple of years have really left me wondering if I was still a part of that group. It wasn't until I started thinking about writing this story, for example, that I decided to finally toss Modern Warfare 3 back in to download all the maps and stuff that had come as a part of the Call of Duty Elite subscription that I definitely wasn't using. And as far as the actual gameplay and multiplayer is concerned, I suppose I'm still on the fence. But after hearing Treyarch's pitch for its story and the sorts of things the studio has planned for Black Ops II's campaign, I'm definitely excited enough to look forward to seeing how the next chapter from Frank Woods, Alex Mason, and Jason Hudson. Their story, though, will play out in the 1980s.
The bulk of Black Ops II will put you in the boots of David Mason, son of Alex Mason, who ran the show in the previous game. The younger Mason is hunting down a bad guy by the name of Raoul Menendez, who first started stirring up trouble when Reagan was in office. The game will open with David Mason heading to a CIA facility known as "The Vault," where the agency keeps people who are too important or crazy to be walking around the streets. It's here where Mason finds Frank Woods and confronts him about his and Alex Mason's past with Menendez. This sends the game flashing back to "old" Cold War as you'll see 1980s Afghanistan and other hot spots that show you what the original Black Ops crew did after Vietnam. Rather than giving you all of the '80s stuff up front, the game will flash back and forth between the past and the future, where Menendez has become the type of action movie villain that would take control of the entire US drone fleet and turn it against both us and China.
So what will warfare look like in 2025? Well, for starters it'll look a whole lot nicer. Treyarch has put in a lot of work on the renderer, and overall, the whole game looks a lot sharper and more detailed, while still running at 60 frames per second. Facial animations looked especially nice, better showing off some of the performance capture that the team has been doing, which includes mocapping horses for that '80s Afghanistan level. But there are plenty of more futuristic things to deal with, as well. In 2025, unmanned drones will apparently rule the battlefield, giving you more targets to shoot at that aren't just your standard soldier. In the downtown Los Angeles level that was shown, Mason went up against the CLAW (Cognitive Land Assault Weapon), which looked like a big, bear-sized robot with a turret mounted on its back. You'll be able to get in on the action, too, by deploying quadcopters with extra-mini miniguns mounted on them. You'll be able to order your drones around a bit with new squad controls. Grenades also look a little different, so in Treyarch's future you'll be launching grenades out of an arm-mounted cannon.
OK, what's the other big knock against the Call of Duty franchise? Seriously, when you're on a message board talking mess about it, what's the thing that everyone brings up? Right, the scripted part where it's totally on-rails and almost completely out of your control. That part is also being addressed in a few ways, which means that Black Ops II will have a branching campaign with multiple outcomes--or at least varying shades of a similar outcome. It's hard to get a read on how different things will actually be in the final game. Some of these changes are extremely simple--for example, the Los Angeles mission has two on-screen icons at one point, allowing you to either rappel down from a broken freeway to help cover the President as she makes her way through an increasingly-hot battlefield or you can choose to stay up on the freeway and snipe as the rest of your crew covers her escape. That sniper rifle, by the way, can see targets through walls and penetrate cover via a charged-up shot that expends more ammo than a standard shot.
That's a minor change, obviously. But it gets bigger. Things you do in the game will impact the overall state of the United States' cold war with China as well as the level of success that Menendez achieves. Some of these changes will be choice-based, but others will hinge on player skill. The clearest example of that on display to us was a Strike Force mission, which takes the campaign in a pretty different direction. These missions are attached to the story, but put you in the role of a team of SEALs who are out to capture a set of objectives. How you achieve these objectives is sort of up to you, giving the game a bit of a sandbox vibe, but overall it looked like a multiplayer sort of map overhauled to give it a set of single-player objectives--points that need to be captured, and so on. If you like, you can stay in the role of a soldier and run around, just like any other Call of Duty game. But you can also pop out of that soldier and get above the battle in "overwatch" mode. From above, you can order your forces around the map like a mini-RTS or pop into any unit to take direct control. This means you can directly control quadcopters, assault drones, and other non-human units. If the unit you're controlling is destroyed, you'll have to find a new unit to control and play continues as normal. But here's the catch: if you run out of units, you fail the mission and the action continues on. Those SEALs didn't capture that objective, and that will have some sort of impact on the overall story. You'll certainly be able to take multiple attempts at the Strike Force scenarios in case you want to ensure a specific outcome, but the idea of hitting a fail state and continuing onward is pretty exciting. At the very least, it's definitely not something I was expecting to find in a Call of Duty game.
When you finish the campaign and see "your" ending, the game will give you some sort of indication as to the points in the game that put you on that course, with the goal being to drive people to play the campaign more than once to see what changes if you play it differently. Again, this isn't the sort of thing that is completely foreign to video games, but in the context of a Call of Duty game, it sounds pretty cool. That Los Angeles level also has you freely flying a VTOL jet in jet mode above downtown LA as you attempt to keep the hacked drones off of the President. It doesn't look like the sort of thing that turns the action into a full-on flight simulator, but it definitely looks more dynamic than some of the diversions that have popped up in previous COD games.
So what about the multiplayer? Other than confirming that all the MP will be set in 2025, they're not really talking about that right now. But the goal for the multiplayer team is to revisit every single system and rebuild any that need rebuilding. This sounds like it could be more than the typical annual shift in how the progression works and what sort of perks you can equip, but it's hard to say. The team is attempting to build a multiplayer game that allows the people who just want to get in and shoot stuff up with their friends to have a good time without alienating the budding professional crowd that wants to shoot people in the face at MLG events. Combat Training will return and Zombies will also return as its own full mode.
Without more hard details on how the multiplayer mode is coming along, it's hard to know if Black Ops II will recapture the hearts and minds of lapsed fans like myself. But I can definitely say that I'm very interested in seeing how Treyarch's campaign ideas play out. Unsurprisingly, we'll all be able to find out in November... assuming that some fiendish villain hasn't taken over or our own unmanned Predator drones and bombed us all back to the Stone Age before then, of course.
http://www.callofduty.com/
Some screenshots today show alot of prototype weapons
[video=youtube_share;x3tedlWs1XY]http://youtu.be/x3tedlWs1XY[/video]
Some screenshots today show alot of prototype weapons
[video=youtube_share;x3tedlWs1XY]http://youtu.be/x3tedlWs1XY[/video]
While it sounds like single player well be more interactive with the different paths you can go, multi player will still be the same shit. I think BO mp shits on MW2/3 mp, but even with new guns and new perks and different kill streaks ( even if they introduce new perk and kill streak systems ) the game will be the same at its core and you will still have the same shitty community playing it, and that will ruin the game once again.
