“Multiplayer is the lifeblood of the franchise,” says Treyarch’s studio head, Mark Lamia. “Call of Duty multiplayer is played 365 days a year, twenty-four seven, all over the world. But we can do better.”
“Black Ops did everything we wanted it to do. We had the customisation, the theatre, the emblem editor, great maps, great options – but one of the things that it didn’t do is look at the gameplay and say: ‘hey, let’s significantly innovate upon some of these core systems.’ Black Ops II takes the core systems and does something new.”
Black Ops II is CoD’s biggest multiplayer overhaul since Call of Duty 4. For the first time you’ll be able to create a custom class entirely from scratch, play with six teams in one game, livestream games without expensive PC hardware, and even enter games as a commentator with a dedicated e-sports HUD.
But more than that, it’s the first CoD where every mode rewards you for playing it properly, and where every weapon and every perk can be rebalanced on a micro level at Treyarch’s end. The moment a perk proves too powerful it can be nerfed without removing it because CoD, says multiplayer designer David Vonderhaar, has become a sport and sports have to be fair.
“I’ve seen our game on the main stage at MLG with a hundred people in the stands rooting for their team,” says Vonderhaar. “I’ve seen it and I think: ‘I’ve got to a find a way to give this to everybody.’ Idon’t know what will happen but I’m sure as f*ck going to try because I have funwatching those people play, because it’s good for e-sports and because it’s good for this business. If we do it right I hope somebody comes along, copies what we did and finds ways to make it even better. I want this to catch on the way perks did. This can be the nextbig thing.”
SPORTING CHANCE
For the first time in any console game, a single button click will let you stream your games to the internet. “All you need to livestream is a little bit of upstream bandwidth and a USB camera if you want picture-in-picture,” says Vonderhaar. “Right now, people who livestream have to have a computer with very expensive hardware and lots of cables, and weget rid of all that.”
“You’ll be able to watch streamed games anywhere – your phone, your iPad, your computer…” says Lamia. “We’re demoing it on our own webpage internally, but there’s nothing magical about the feed itself, and nothing to stop you from broadcasting it when and how you want.”
The feed runs with a delay – in part a limitation of the time your console needs to compress and send the video, and in part an artificially-enforced delay to prevent cheating. That’s especially important for Black Ops II’s new Shoutcasting mode – a dedicated commentator’s HUD, with full camera controls, the ability to jump to any players’ view and a picture-in-picture scoreboard and map for tracking even the fastest games. The Shoutcast HUD is built with tournament play in mind and designed to be readable quickly and easily for audiences at Major League Gaming shows and other professional tournaments, and just like everyone else the Shoutcasting commentator can livestream their ownview and become the host oftheir own Call of Duty show.
But none of that would matter if the old Call of Duty gripes threatened to break the game. Those motion sensors, those overpowered killstreaks, those players who play every objective mode like it were Deathmatch, and those players who spoil your game by being too bad / too good are all problems Treyarch have heard, understood, and fixed.
If Xbox are pushing the games, Sony is pushing the hardware. Robert Fisser, general manager for PlayStaion in the Mema region, proudly waved the new, smaller and slimmer version of the PS3 at the pre-convention conference. “Announced yesterday, and already in the UAE,” he said.
Installation will reduce stress on Blu-ray drive, but requires a “non-trivial amount of HDD space”.
The PlayStation 3 version of Call of Duty: Black Ops II will feature an optional texture installation to reduce “constant stress on the Blu-ray drive”, Treyarch has announced.
“This is one the fans having been demanding for a bit,” Treyarch’s David Vonderhaar explained on the official Call of Duty forums. “Black Ops 2 has an option to “Install Textures to HDD.
“When we explained to PS3 folks that installing to the HDD wouldn’t necessarily give us any significant performance gains, they explained back that the issue is they play so much it puts constant stress on the Blu-ray drive and wears them out.
“Roger that.”
Treyarch doesn’t yet know how much HDD space the installation will require, but says that it’ll be a “non-trivial amount”.
“It’s a non-trivial amount of HDD space to install all the textures,” Vonderhaar continued. “I don’t want to get into exactly [sic] numbers because anything can, and does change during development.
“You don’t have to install to enjoy the game. We still pre-cache like we did on Black Ops.”
It isn’t yet known whether installing the textures will offer improved load times or allow for higher-resolution textures, or whether the Xbox 360 version will also include an optional installation.
Last year, the Xbox 360 version of Battlefield 3 included an optional texture installation, allowing for higher-resolution textures to be displayed once installed.
Call of Duty: Black Ops II launches on Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and PC on November 13.
Call of Duty developer David Vonderhaar’s talk entitled “Challenging Assumptions”.
This s*** just got realer! Realer? More real. Corporeal. Manifest. Substantial. Etc. Yes, we’re very pleased to reveal that at this year’s Eurogamer Expo we will have Treyarch presenting a Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 developer session at 3pm on Friday 28th September.
Treyarch’s game design director David Vonderhaar will be leading the line in a session entitled “Challenging Assumptions”.
Vonderhaar’s game is also on the show floor, as you may remember, so if you want to see how it feels to have Score Streaks replace Kill Streaks, and what the game’s new take on eSports looks like, then make sure to play Black Ops 2 multiplayer as well as checking out the developer session.
Other Eurogamer Expo developer sessions include Frank O’Connor (Halo 4), Hideo Kojima (Metal Gear), James Russell (Rome 2) and Dean Hall (DayZ). And, er, that’s just day one. We’ve also got Valve, Ubisoft Montreal, Arkane Studios, Peter Molyneux, Crystal Dynamics and loads of others. It’s bonkers. The show floor is rammed too. Every game you could want to play, or so we hope.
Check out www.eurogamerexpo.com for more information and tickets, and please do come, for your own sake, because you’ll be kicking your own face off in disappointment if you miss out.
It looks like Treyarch are finally ready to start their Black Ops 2 zombies viral campaign. The developer has just sent out a series of videos, containing some mysterious visual and audio clips that will provide clues to the upcoming adventure when the game releases on November 13.
They do this every year in the build up to zombies – remember the whole GKNOVA6 campaign that kept everyone guessing with Black Ops 1? It is good fun trying to crack the code so to speak and it’s nice to see Activision and Treyarch doing the same thing for Black Ops 2 zombies.
A video has been released to the Call of Duty YouTube channel, titled ‘Power on’. It is obviously related to zombies, but the sounds heard in the clip could be related to a number of possibilities. The first we believe, is that it could be the ‘Power on’ sound when activating the power during a traditional game of zombies.
However, it does also sound like some sort of teleporter being activated as well and you’ll know that teleporters are a big deal in the world of zombies, with the four main characters often teleporting to different places as new maps are released.
Within the last hour, Treyarch has released a second zombie teaser, titled ‘Attack’. This one is more straight forward and is probably one of the new sounds the zombies will make as they come to attack you. Hopefully all of the clips will lead to something bigger, as for the moment – the GKNOVA campaign was more intense than just a couple of sounds.
Take a look at the clips for yourself and let us know your thoughts on them. Any clues as to what is being shown on the TV? Some say it looks like a perk machine in the top right, but we’re unconvinced.
So, in case you hadn’t heard, Borderlands 2 is coming out tomorrow. Basically, expect the gaming press to be nothing but Borderlands 2 for about the next week or so. We’ll be running an initial impressions tomorrow and a full review later this week, ourselves.
In short, it’s about to be enormously successful and a real feather in the cap of Gearbox Software, not to mention a major money-maker for 2K and probably the game that revives the currently struggling boxed games retail market. It’s so successful that you can literally download it for the PS3 day and date.
I’m happy for Gearbox and I’m looking forward to the game. I’m just a little worried about what happens next.
Gearbox and 2K are already enthusiastically firing up the DLC train: Anybody who didn’t preorder the game will have to pay $10 for a new character class, plus $10 to $15 each for DLC packs. Or you could give them $30 for the season pass.
This is unfortunately nothing new. Any game with odds of selling a lot of copies already has DLC plans in place, whether it’s dribs and drabs of new stuff every week or big packs every few months. Still, it’s annoying to hear that if I want what amounts to the best possible game, I’m expected to pre-order and pay $90. I’ll settle, thanks.
The first Borderlands sold quite well, and credit has to be given to 2K and Gearbox for marketing it carefully. You’ve had dozens of chances to play this game for pretty much dirt cheap for months, with DLC included, on pretty much any platform.
As a result, the second one is going to be a monster. Keep in mind that 2K’s preorder records include games like Grand Theft Auto IV and BioShock, and this game has blown past both of those franchises with more preorders coming in every single day. This will handily outsell the first one, likely to the tune of eight or nine million copies.
Which is officially “Let’s Milk This Cow For Every Penny” territory.
2K has a different philosophy than Activision, but they like money just like any other company and they’re happy to meddle. Much of the reports of trouble at Irrational over Bioshock Infinite were actually about 2K making demands that involve squeezing the eagle until it screams. Seriously, does anybody think multiplayer in the BioShock franchise was the idea of anybody actually developing the game?
It’s true that Borderlands is not a deep, complex franchise, but even dumb games can be ruined by greed. It’s something I hope everybody involved keeps in mind when the planning for Borderlands 3 fires up.
Another week has begun and with it comes more exciting gaming news, this time from the goldmine of information that is Call of Duty: Black Ops II. Treyarch game design director David Vonderhaar, who has talked fans through the many features included in Black Ops II, took to his Twitter account to give us the skinny on how weapon levels and unlocks are affected when you eventually decide to prestige.
Keep your Akimbo when you prestige!
David Vonderhaar is always out to please gamers, so his Twitter page is as busy as a spoon in a soup kitchen and when asked about the unlocks and weapon level formalities when you prestige, he said:
“Just got this bug from QA. Weapon levels are given after unlocking a gun that was leveled up on a past level progression.’ That’s what we call NAB. Not a bug. If you Prestige and unlock the gun, you’ll pick up right where you left off. If something has been a certain way a long time, the assumption when it doesn’t work the way it has in the past is that it is a bug.”
This will make many fans happy that they don’t need to start over again once they hit those prestige levels, it might take some of the replay value from the game however, but hey that’s what zombies are for. On the other hand it might be necessary to include due to the new create-a-class system the game will feature in Black Ops II, which you can check out here. Either way we can expect a first-person shooter like no other when the game eventually launches.
Call of Duty: Black Ops II will launch for Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and PC on November 13, with the Wii U also getting in on the action on November 18. Are you happy with all the new changes in Black Ops II? Let us know in the section below or head over to our Facebook page and drop us a comment there.
Are you really excited about Black Ops 2 and its new futuristic setting this year? The game is set for release in a few months time and the one aspect of the game that remains a mystery is the elusive zombie mode and its new features.
We know a zombie mode is definitely coming but Treyarch hasn’t confirmed any major details yet, other than the fact that there will be a special zombies Nuketown map for those that pre-order the game early. However, we told you back in March that there was evidence of a secret beta confirming a zombies campaign mode for the game, and new details over the weekend suggest that this may indeed be an official feature at release.
Amazon has again revealed some unannounced details of the game in their Black Ops 2 listing, confirming that zombie mode will be playable in both multiplayer and a campaign. We’ve also discovered that the video embedded in our March report has now been removed by Activision, citing a copyright claim – so it does look very likely that zombies is now going to have a campaign mode.
This opens up a whole new area of possibility for Treyarch to take zombies and we may even see the whole survival format changed, to perhaps passing certain missions, engaging in the storyline a lot more and interacting with environments allowing the player to perhaps go in and out of buildings as they choose.
Imagine an open world environment where your objective is no longer to make it through as many waves as possible, but to locate a possible item or gadget that is located in a building full of infested zombies. If Treyarch has added co-op support for this campaign mode, it could turn out to be a massive success and even more popular than the current survival format that we’re used to seeing.
We can’t wait to see what zombie campaign entails in Black Ops 2, but for now give us your initial ideas on how it could work.
Activision has released a 30 second video clip of single-player footage from the Wii U version of Call Of Duty: Black Ops II, featuring squirrel suits, jet packs, and what looks to be a silky smooth frame rate.
Although Black Ops II was only mentioned in passing during the European Wii U preview last week it was a centrepiece of the American event, with the footage below introduced by Activision Publishing boss Eric Hirshberg.
At the time he promised the game would run at a full 60 frames per second and would incorporate the ‘full Call Of Duty’ experience, including multiplayer and – it’s implied – Zombies mode. The game will also feature Wii U exclusive features such as using the GamePad touchscreen as a map and allowing co-op play from one console, with one player on the GamePad and the other on the TV.
Details are still sketchy though and it’s not clear when exactly the Wii U version will be released. It’s currently only in the ‘launch window’, but last week so too was Tekken Tag Tournament 2 and that’s already been upgraded to launch day (November 30 in the UK). We wouldn’t be surprised to find Black Ops II and others follow the same route.
In other Black Ops II news what purports to be a list of single-player missions and multiplayer maps has appeared on the Se7enSins forum, based on information supposedly dug out of the beta multiplayer code. Whether it’s accurate or not we couldn’t say but we’re not repeating it here for fear of spoilers, so click this link at your own risk…
So, in case you hadn’t heard, Borderlands 2 is coming out tomorrow. Basically, expect the gaming press to be nothing but Borderlands 2 for about the next week or so. We’ll be running an initial impressions tomorrow and a full review later this week, ourselves.
