It's Treyarch's turn to roll out the next Call of Duty title, and this time they're looking to shake things up a bit. Black Ops 2 jumps forward in time, all the way up to the year 2025. It appears that there will be futuristic vehicles, and weapons at the very least. Who knows, maybe even some zombies!
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.
Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 Reveal Trailer
Why the interest, Ned
