The Call of Duty franchise is often criticized for its iterative nature. With Black Ops III, Treyarch is hoping to address those complaints through a bevy of new additions to the gameplay. From the MOBA-inspired Specialists to the Titanfall-like movement mechanics, Black Ops III has ambitions to deliver the biggest steps forward the series has seen when it launches on November 6.
During a recent visit to Treyarch, we participated in a roundtable discussion with studio head Mark Lamia, campaign director and executive producer Jason Blundell, and game director Dan Bunting about the new design, mechanics, and features making their way into the latest Call of Duty.
Designing Immersion With New Parameters
Black Ops III is the first Treyarch made Call of Duty game given a three-year development cycle thanks to the addition of Sledgehammer Games to the rotation. According to the team, the added year of development was of utmost importance for all of the changes and additions to this year’s release.
For the campaign, players are not only given new abilities that can be used on any level, but those levels are designed to be more open and playable with up to four players. All of these changes inspired Treyarch to take a new approach to artificial intelligence in Black Ops III, allowing for different experiences over the course of multiple playthroughs. “The A.I. system is completely rewritten.” Lamia says. “It’s adaptive, it has to deal with emergent situations, it has to deal with the variety of different characters that you have. Call of Duty hasn’t seen a new A.I. system in a very long time.”
Treyarch also reworked its graphics engine for this release to include deferred render and new lighting and effects systems. “I wanted to bring back just those insane battles that only Call of Duty could do,” Lamia says. “There is so much stuff going on that we simply could not render all of that at that quality at 60 frames per second. You just can’t do that unless you do an overhaul of that whole system.”
On the next page, we discuss how Treyarch anticipated the technology of 2060 in Black Ops III.