Dan Bunting, lead multiplayer designer at Treyarch, is talking about the news stories that have influenced Black Ops 3 during the game’s three-year development cycle. Set 50 years in the future, with a new Cold War as its backdrop, the latest CoD battlefield is a very different place. Widescale Drone warfare has been neutralised through the development of powerful air defence systems, so the emphasis is back on ground infantry once again.
But the soldiers themselves have changed. The invention of direct neural interfacing between the human brain and computer technology has led to a new era of bio-augmentation and cybernetic enhancement. In Black Ops 3, the player is part of an experimental unit fitted with bionic limbs and a wealth of other future-tech improvements that blend mind and machine. According to Treyarch a lot of this is closer to science than fiction.
“You make an estimate of where you think technology will be in the 2060s, then a few months later you hear that the foundations of that technology are happening today,” says camp
During a press visit to the Treyarch studio in Santa Monica, the team shows off a demo of one Black Ops 3 campaign mission, which takes place at Cairo’s Ramses station. It’s pretty recognisable Call of Duty fare, a chaotic maelstrom of swarming ground troops, explosive air support and yelling NPCs. However, the high-tech stuff soon arrives. A dropship deposits a self-building “mobile wall” into the street to cordon off the area. Later, the player’s squad is attacked by a duo of giant robotic balls covered in spikes that zoom in and splatter their way through the forces (these devastating gadgets – weirdly reminiscent of the alien weaponry in the Battleships movie – are called Robotic Anti-Personnel Sentry Droids, and are available as a scorestreak in the multiplayer). Then, a cloud of mini-drones immolate a soldier. The scene ends with one allied operative using a tablet to select a whole area of the battlefield before seemingly causing it to blow apart through cybernetically-enhanced telekinesis.
In gameplay terms, the most obvious impact of this technological leap into bio-augmentation is the new movement system. Player soldiers wear upgradeable cyber-suits that allow them to double jump onto rooftops, run along walls and powerslide along the floor, chaining moves together to traverse the environment in a smooth, streamlined dance. Objects can be mantled without loss of speed or firing potential and soldiers can sprint forever: “There is no marathon perk, there is no lightweight perk, it just works that way,” says studio design director David Vonderhaar. “This is really important. It’s the glue that holds everything else together. You can continue to stay guns-up. The aim is to wind the combat loop as tight as possible.”
Of course, comparisons with both Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare and rival sci-fi shooter Titanfall are inevitable. The latter made a big deal of its enhanced boost jumps and vertical sprinting, and given the fact that developer Respawn Entertainment emerged from Call of Duty creator Infinity Ward in the most controversial of circumstances, criticisms and conspiracy theories are going to cloud this aspect of the game.
And they won’t finish there. The new “specialists” feature in Black Ops 3 allows players to take part in multiplayer bouts as one of nine elite spec-ops warriors, each with their own powerful special weapons and abilities. These are only available when an onscreen meter powers up, and they are intended as a mid-point between regular combat and the scorestreaks that tend only to be accessible to more skilled players. It all sounds extremely similar to the Titan system in Respawn’s game, where a timer counts down to the point at which players get to call in their giant mech.
Naturally, Treyarch doesn’t broach this directly – but it does address questions about how familiar the system seems. “It’s not to be confused with the [Advanced Warfare] exo jump; mechanically, it works extremely differently,” says Vonderhaar. “Ours has nothing to do with verticality – our maps have a height limit of two storeys and staying in the combat frame [i.e. being able to always see the opponent] are keys to our design strategy. But we did want to remove the obstacles that slow the player down. Ladders in [multiplayer] suck. They’re not fun to get on and climb up.”
Then studio head Mark Lamia chimes in with a comment seemingly laser targeted at any Titanfall references. “To be fair, we did make Spider-Man,” he says, referring to the company’s acclaimed, parkour-influenced super hero tie-in from 2002. “We had some amazing movement systems in that game. We showed Black Ops 3 to the Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater developers and said ‘you guys should get this’. And they did.”
At the demo event, we get to play three new multiplayer maps. Combine is set in a labyrinthine farming research facility in the Egyptian Sahara, with an open courtyard providing a frenetic kill zone in the centre. Stronghold is a Swiss chateau which mixes tight interiors with open areas that offer long sight lines. Hunted is the biggest map in the game, a picturesque mansion complete with a waterfall, pool and underwater tunnel.
It’s the latter that proves most interesting. Treyarch has apparently been trying to add swimming to its CoD games for years, but has finally mastered the feature. Now you can dive into the water, move about freely in the aquatic environment, and even use your gun. A pre-demo video shows players shooting out of the water at passersby moving along the water’s edge.
Elsewhere, the movement system does handle very differently to Advanced Warfare. The controls are more subtle, so that it feels less like a turbo boost into the air, and more like a controlled ascent. Wall runs are easy to set up via an angled sprint toward a vertical surface and a deft tap on the jump button. When connected with a wall, you can then leap on to another surface, and even jump out, pull back on the analogue stick and reverse the movement, so you’re suddenly going backwards. It’s a great evasive move, and it suggests that head-to-head encounters are going to be less about who has the fastest trigger finger.
Jump out again, then press the “crouch” button and you hit the ground in a power slide, which can be directed around corners. It’s complex yet accessible and within minutes players are chaining moves together, turning the environment into a pro-skater playground. We’re having a lot of fun.
But we’re also aware that this is not unique and it’s not, in itself, innovative: rocket jumps and special ability pick-ups have been part of first-person shooter design since the beginning. Before CoD, before Titanfall, id Software littered its levels with limited availability weapons and armour; Crysis brought us cyber suits and timed abilities. This has always been a genre that has supported the evolution and sub-division of feature-sets. But Treyarch is going to have to be on the defensive. And it will need to reassure gamers who prefer the traditional CoD experience that its flights of spatial fancy won’t be too disruptive. “We don’t force anything on players,” says Bunting. “If they don’t want to use thrust jump or wall-running they don’t have to. Most encounters will still be boots-on-the floor.”
Really though, perhaps the biggest change to Call of Duty is happening away from multiplayer, and away from movement controls. It is the campaign mission design. Not only will this mode be playable in co-op with up to three friends, but Treyarch says that the game will abandon the corridor approach and provide much larger, more explorable environments. “We’re allowing you to go off the rails,” says Blundell. “You will really be able to explore the space, to decide how you engage the area and to move through it.”
Apparently, the areas are so open that players simply won’t be able to see everything in one playthrough – if they choose an approach, there will be sections they won’t see. Also, in classic RPG style, players will be able to upgrade their characters with a range of special abilities as they gain XP. These aren’t the static pre-set soldiers of traditional CoD, these are personalised avatars who progress. According to Treyarch there are around 40 “cyber core” abilities, like drone hacking for example, that players earn as they go and can use when they like. And as players gain new abilities they get to show these off in the dedicated safe house area visited between missions, where soldiers are customised and where participants can personalise their bunks with medals and achievement markers.
Blundell says this concept of freeform character customisation has forced changes to the narrative structure. Black Ops 2 brought in branching story elements with several different endings. Black Ops 3 gains longevity in a different way. “Due to the type of game it is, and the type of story we wanted to tell, rather than having a branching storyline, we’ve gone for a design that’s more like peeling back layers of an onion – that’s the most tactical way I can describe it,” explains Blundell. “This is definitely a story that needs multiple replays; there are different perspectives, things that you learn as you play, so you may want to go back later to re-experience certain moments in a fresh way.”
Treyarch also reckons that this move to open environments and customisable player-characters has demanded major changes to the artificial intelligence system too. “As the spaces get bigger, the AI needs to be able to make intelligent decisions in that space,” says Blundell. “So we’ve created a new animation system and a goal-orientated AI that supports over 20 different types of archetypes – bipedal robots, humans, rolling balls of death – they decide how they engage you and how they move through space. For the first time they also communicate together and move into formations based on where you are and your abilities.”
Once again, it’s nothing new for the genre, but it’s certainly new for Call of Duty. True, this is still a game about shooting people in the face, and the setup remains a macho fantasy of specialist warriors going in and clearing up when science and military-industrial complexes drop the fucking ball, dude. But the Black Ops series has always toyed with the fundaments of the series, and this is an interesting step toward something slightly more complicated. The role-playing elements, the reactive AI and the slick traversal systems represent a climb out of CoD’s self-imposed ghetto of immediate, gutsy action and twitch-core simplicity.
So while non-believers will wince and hurl accusations, long-term fans will be intrigued. Call of Duty, always the totem of unapologetic blast-em-up action, is also sometimes a subversive presence – witness the legendary nuclear death scene in Modern Warfare or the stomach-churning No Russian mission in Modern Warfare 2. Treyarch is promising a gritty messed-up story with Black Ops 3, and it says it has big plans for the Zombie mode (which is set to have its own dedicated XP progression system) but it’s the systemic changes that could prove most interesting and disruptive to this vast money-making edifice.
“In game development, if you feel totally comfortable you’re not doing it right,” says Bunting. “This is our first time on the new console technology, we’ve had a three-year cycle, so we took bigger risks from the outset. We wanted to go for something new and fresh.”
I guess we’re about to find out what new and fresh looks like when there’s a billion dollars riding on the result.
@http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/apr/28/call-of-duty-black-ops-3-biggest-shooter-in-world
0 comments:
Post a Comment