When David Vonderhaar discusses Call of Duty: Black Ops II multiplayer, it’s like listening to an intelligent, articulate critique of the franchise’s unwillingness to change. As Game Design Director, Vonderhaar is the idea man. He’s a well-spoken developer who’s proud of his team and title. When he tells me about the new direction for Black Ops II multiplayer, he’s confident and excited. But each time he tells me about a new concept, he qualifies it by saying, “I can’t believe I didn’t think of this sooner.” Vonderhaar is hard on himself, and it’s hardly surprising. His smart and simple changes seem so obvious the moment you see them that you’ll wonder what took so long to implement them.
With Black Ops II pushing its setting a decade into the future, it makes sense that Treyarch is, finally and in multiple ways, modernizing Call of Duty. The overhauled user-interface makes Modern Warfare 3 look and feel like a relic of gaming’s past. The newfound depth of character customization caters to and empowers different kinds of Call of Duty players. Most importantly, the retooled reward system will alter the way millions of people play the biggest first-person shooter in existence.
Before you step onto the battlefield to capture flags or dominate control points, you’ll want to spend some quality time getting to know the new loadout system. The user interface is cleaner, making it easier to take in information -- attachments are all laid out side by side, while guns rotate on a carousel menu. Vonderhaar doesn’t want players wasting time diving into and pulling back out of unnecessary menus. The elegance is necessary. Without it, managing the new customization system would be disastrous. Instead, it enables new ways of building custom classes.
Drones: The new bane of your existence.
The internal nickname for Treyarch’s customization system is “Pick 10,” since, well, that’s what you do. In the past, you had to take items into battle “whether you cared for them or didn’t care for them,” Vonderhaar says, “whether you used them or didn’t.” Each of your class loadouts in Black Ops II has a maximum of 10 slots you can fill however you please. If you don’t use secondary firearms, simply remove it from your set and replace it with a perk, grenade, or attachment. In addition to this, Vonderhaar throws players a potential curveball: you can sacrifice a perk or tactical item for a Wild Card, providing further options.
These could have huge ramifications on multiplayer.
With these, you can double the amount of frag grenades you spawn with, add a second primary weapon to your loadout, or take additional perks. You may have to opt against taking a scope or a pistol, but Treyarch makes each strategic decision worth your while. You can even skip guns altogether, equip three perk-centric Wild Cards, and go into each match with six perks -- just try to steal a weapon as fast as possible, yeah?
The idea of Pick 10 was born out of an actual boardgame.
“What makes the Wild Cards special is they allow you to break the rules of the traditional system,” says Vonderhaar. This is handled within reason -- you can't stack Wild Cards to carry just grenades into battle, for instance. Each slot variant has limited restrictions, but they allow an additional kind of flexibility.
If you’re first instinct says this sounds an awful lot like a table-top game, you’re not wrong. Vonderhaar and Treyarch built board games to get a grip on how the loadout system would function, what the possibilities were, and to ultimately define their new open-ended philosophy. All of this happened “before writing a single line of code” for Black Ops II, Vonderhaar explains. This helped the developer destroy and rebuild the rigid class customization of previous entries, while identifying issues that needed solving.
David Vonderhaar “will never, ever design video games again without going through this process.”
Pick 10 truly allows you to play to your personal style. It lets you focus on what works and reject what doesn’t. In turn, you’ll become a better, more capable competitor. The results of your decisions come to life, of course, on the battlefield. Experimenting with loadout styles felt like experimenting with a collectible card game deck or trying on an outfit -- you sample what you have, see how it suits you, and adapt accordingly.
However you suit up, you’ll want to use whatever scores you the most points. Points are the new focus; Kill Streaks are out, Score Streaks are in. Now you earn streak bonuses based on what you do overall, not just how many dudes you kill in a row. Kills are part of it, certainly, but Treyarch is steering players in a direction the Call of Duty franchise desperately needed: Playing as a team, and playing carefully, are more important than ever.
Black Ops II incentivizes players going for objectives rather than kills. Scoring a headshot makes you considerably less points than scoring a flag or control-point capture. What’s more, killing while carrying the flag doubles the points you earn, which fills your Score Streak meter much faster. When you cross the point threshold of your equipped streaks -- each has its own numerical value, ranging from the low hundreds to the 1200 point range -- you unlock access and unleash.
Now players need to repeatedly score to keep their streak bonuses in play. If you die, you lose your score streak. This is incredibly important. It forces Call of Duty players to stop rushing, start thinking, and value their precious life. As I poured more time into multiplayer, I found myself stepping away from traditional Call of Duty values. Black Ops II looks and plays and feels just like any other series entry, but the mentality with which you approach the competitive side is completely different. Don’t be surprised to see players behaving as though they’re playing SOCOM or Counter-Strike. Even though you respawn, each life matters.
With all this in mind, Treyarch has removed the COD Points currency system, so all unlocks -- whether it's slots for your Pick 10, Score Streaks, or weapons -- are gated off by rank. You level up, you get more. When you Prestige at 55 and start again, you'll still be unlocking new stuff.
These shields can be placed for cover.
That each piece of gear affects a specific person in a deeper way than any past Call of Duty games is the heart of Black Ops II multiplayer. This is a bold departure from the franchise’s numbing familiarity. For the first time since Modern Warfare's debut, a Call of Duty game is uprooting shooter conventions -- in due time, other designers will follow and borrow Vonderhaar's ideas for own games. Treyarch is content to leave Modern Warfare 3 to its own devices. Each of Vonderhaar’s ideas help broaden the appeal of Black Ops II, because they seem to serve as reactions to vicious online criticisms of Call of Duty -- most notably, uh, that scathing Call of Duty Needs to Change thing that I wrote.
Mitch Dyer is an Associate Editor for IGN's Xbox 360 team. He’s also quite Canadian. Read his ramblings on Twitter and follow him on IGN.
Source : ign[dot]com
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