Developer Treyarch is excited about the changes of the second Black Ops title and hopes that the fans like them too.
Treyarch studio head Mark Lamia said that Black Ops 2 will be very different from Black Ops 1, which is why he hopes that gamers will be “excited by the changes”. He explained that the development team didn’t want to update the previous Call of Duty title, they wanted to create a game with new features.
“[We] rethought everything, from setting, to the new toys to play with, to story branching, to meaningful choice inside the campaign. When we decided to talk to Activision about the branding of Black Ops, it was very deliberate, like: ‘Look, Black Ops is more of a characteristic of the personality of the game.’”
“We love the idea that Black Operations were off the radar and creatively, you had that conceit that these guys could do all kinds of things. It didn’t have to fit into any kind of time period or preconceived notions of what these operations might be like.”
“So the teams got very creative with that, whether it was with the story or the multiplayer. You’ll see all kinds of gadgets, you saw it in Black Ops, you’ll see it in Black Ops 2, we just went for it with the weapons. It was about: ‘This is fun to play.’”
“We were able to, in our own way, justify it within the fiction of Black Ops. These guys, they always had access to the best of the best. They’d get prototype weapons, they’d modify weapons, they’d do all kinds of stuff perfect for gameplay. That was a really great creative thing to build on.”
Treyarch “wanted to make some different changes inside the franchise”, Lamia said.
■ Jensen6
