CoD: BO First Look, Part III "WMD"

 

Rows of leather seats occupy the front of the room. A hefty surround sound system guards the chairs and a high quality projection system, on standby, purrs overhead.

We are in the "MAC-T" compound: Military Assistance Compound - Treyarch. An inside joke that would later be explained during the briefing.

Our hosts enter the room:

Activision's John Racasz and bearded birthday-boy, Josh Selinger provide Activision-PR supervision. Leading the Treyarch delegation, an energetic and fashionably late, studio head Mark Lamia, makes his entry to vigorous applause.

Supporting Mark is our chaperone, Josh Olin (JD_2020). Flitting in and out of the room are additional reinforcements provided by Multi-player Senior Producer Dan Bunting, multiplayer design director, the exhuberant David Vonderhaar (Vahn), the seasoned PC-guru, Cesar Stastny (PCDev) and video-podcaster Dan Amrich (OneofSwords).

Lamia: "Today, we're going to share with you our game, Call of Duty: Black Ops and we're going to give you a little behind the scenes...we're going to let you meet the guys who make the game.

Call of Duty: Black Ops...

We're going to take you to a variety of locations and conflicts across the globe. As Black Ops forces you're going to fight the deniable operations and secret wars that occurred under the veil of the Cold War. That's what it's all about. I know the game's and the team's work will speak for itself. So we're going to jump right into the levels.

The first level we're going to do is to take you deep behind enemy lines to a weapon's manufacturing facility in the Soviet Union.

This level is called 'WMD'".

The room's attention switches to the forward projection screen. A Trey dev, picks up an XBox controller. "Demigod Mode" is selected and play begins.

<The 'bunker' goes silent as the game quickly loads> 

WMD

The year is 1968.

<A driving synth and bass ruptures the silence>

The soundtrack's heavy beat pounds out at 2/4 time and it syncopates with my heartbeat. The decibels crank.

Anxiety levels peak as the first person perspective focuses on a Titanium-black aircraft, readied for departure.

The throbbing soundtrack stops.

"BigEye6 requesting takeoff"

"BigEye6, you're cleared for takeoff, runway 4..."

"Confirm refuel with KC135 in sector Bravo69er"

"Affirmative BigEye6. KC135 is in the sector."

The ATC gives approval for takeoff.

"BigEye6 you have the sky".

"Your aircraft, sir", urges the plane's co-pilot.

"Copy"

<Engines spool up instantly. Fuel pours into the engine's afterburning stages and the plane kicks hard.>

The surround system thumps and it feels like someone just punched me in the gut. The big bird screams into the night sky. You rocket ever upward, finally reaching near-space cruising altitude.

The opening sequence and the music reminds me of the carrier takeoff in the first scene from Top Gun.

"BigEye6 this is Kilo 1 requesting tactical recon. Over. Repeat. We can't see anything down here."

A four-man team, Kilo 1, traipsing through low visibility, snow covered terrain in the Soviet-controlled Ural mountains are requesting the SR-71 to provide a real-time sitrep so that they can progress to their target.

Heat signatures of the Black Ops patrol and of their Soviet military adversary is seen on a tactical display within the SR-71.

Heat signatures blur and streak. The visuals are not as crisp as those seen in the thermal imagery depicted in Modern Warfare 2 and this is completely in keeping with the more antiquated CRT displays of the latter half of the twentieth century. Kudos for realism.

The scene shifts down to the ground. We now get first person perspective of the Black Ops team. 

You are prone, armed with a simple crossbow, as you watch a Soviet convoy move past, careful not to call yourself to its attention.

Your men move slowly, struggling through deep snow. Footsteps are slow and methodical. Boots crash through the top layer of frozen ice into powdery snow below.

As the convoy of Soviet vehicles blocks the squad's progress, the "BigEye" in the sky helps Kilo1 maneuver.

The team climbs onto the roof of a sub-station that is located within a large Soviet compound high in the mountains. Your first mission is to take the substation on the way to shutting down the compound's communication station (COMM STAT).

You and your team rappels from the roof and you smash through the station's glass windows.

<Claxons go off and bodies hit the floor under withering suppressed fire>

Your suppressed AUG's do their work and you set off for the next target. The SR71 relays the fact that it is moving to orbit the COMM STAT. The team moves out.

          <Russian voices>

Someone whispers,  "Pick one".

 "Kilo1, approaching target"

The COMM STAT will be taken in stages. First, I'll need to take the storage shed from the south and then move to the power room up ahead to the north, but multiple targets block your path.

Your crossbow will serve you well as you approach stealthily, but you are cautioned to switch to "explosive-tip" bolts if you get heat.

Guess what? There's heat.

<A cacophony of heavy machine gun fire and explosives rips through the valley>

You fire explosive bolts at the enemy. Beeping sounds countdown the delayed fuse. Legs and arms shred as the tip explodes. The hapless target and his colleagues go down in agony. The scenario repeats.

You make it through alive and you take the shed. You and the team move to the power room. The door is breached and without hesitation, your player flings a knife at a Soviet soldier on the other side of the doorway. The enemy clutches his throat and is neutralized.

"Kilo1 is at the COMM STAT. Team is in position. Ready when you are."

The word is given and all hell breaks loose. 

Your team struggles to survive in the firefight, but finally manages to shut down the relay dish.

"Confirm. Relay is offline"

<The music soundtrack comes back to life>

"Avalanche!"

The group runs down the mountain and faces a cliff. The men calmly leap over the edge and base-jump to the ground.

<Whoops and applause>

Fourteen minutes of gameplay later, the level of variety is already evident. Flying a jet plane, crossing snow-covered gorges, rappelling down the sides of buildings and base-jumping are all in a day's work for you as a member of Black Ops.

The crunch of the footfalls through the snow is realistic and quite well done - a much better effort than the "shuffling" footsteps we suffered through back in CoD:WW.

Treyarch seems to like having iconic weapons for each game it makes. In CoD:WW, the weapon it picked as a metaphor for the game was the flamethrower. In CoD:BO, that icon appears to be the crossbow.

An ancient weapon, it is evocative of a simpler, more barbaric time. Perhaps a perfect way to sum up the close-combat fighting witnessed in the game.

Lamia: "This is an entertainment experience truly on an epic scale. You're going to be experiencing a lot of new stuff. You guys have all have played a lot of Call of Duty...and all the people that follow you as well. You have had so much great Call of Duty experiences and we want to give you something new.

So, there's going to be plenty of what you love about Call of Duty but there's going to be a lot of new stuff.

Even just the opening of this level, with the SR71, you can take off in it and controlling troops on the ground. Getting some alternative weapons and even some alternative ammo for those weapons...and

I'll tell you how some of that got inspired.

The rappel game play, the breaches...

Pacing between what's going on in levels and pacing between levels, our teams are paying attention to all those things, when we're crafting missions.

One of the things I love about CoD is 'what is coming next'. We're going to bring you new and fresh experiences to you. In that level there's a bunch of different gameplay.

WMD is a good example of a couple of things.

One thing is the era.

We chose the era and wanted to own it. It's totally ownable. It's really fertile ground for gaming, it's not been done by a lot of people.

The thing about the era is that it's not a defined conflict. It's not about the Cold War. It's about the Black Ops that occurred underneath the Cold War, the kind of operations that if they went "hot", who knows where those would have led that time in history.

That time opens things up for us to give you all new experiences.

Black Ops were the best of the best.

They were the godfathers of tactical recon.

These were the best of all the military branches that chose to take on the black operations. They were leaders on the battlefield. They were allowed to approach their missions as they saw fit.

As we were listening to stories inspired by people like Major John Plaster*.

"...He would tell us that they would get their briefing on what they were supposed to do. It's a briefing on a deniable operation. No one is going to come in after them if something goes wrong. They study the op with their team and then go to the armory and put together their operation and then they would get dropped behind enemy lines.

As a gamemaker, this is awesome. It's perfect for what we love to do in game design. What we like to do is come up with our missions and have our players be able to take the kind of weapons or whatever they need into the battlefield. And you can imagine what the multiplayer guys would think.

They could even use prototypes if they felt they could use it in their missions.

For example, one story he told us about was that in Vietnam, no one ever heard of (like) a football blowhorn. And they actually took one of those on a mission and scared the crap out of a whole division of NVA (North Vietnamese Army) who never heard that in the middle of a jungle...and it went

"BA-BAAAAAP!" and the whole place scattered.

Of course, the blow-horn won't be one of the big weapons in Call of Duty!

<laughter>

You could sometimes even send home for ingredients for things that weren't in South East Asia. These guys could do anything. No one was going to tell them how to run their operations other than them.

We also met with Sonny Puzikas** who was a Soviet Spetsnaz soldier from the era.

He was an inspirational individual to say the least. People ask where do we draw our inspirations. From them. You can't help but be inspired standing in front of a veteran and he starts to talk to you. They know we are making an entertainment experience first and foremost. They're excited that people will use that and draw inspiration from it and maybe read up on things. But they know we're making an entertainment product.

WMD is a big open, outdoor arctic-tundra environment. This next level is a completely different type of level."

...to be continued

*ed: Major John L. Plaster was born in 1949, US Army-Ret. and is a former United States Army Special Forces, Military Assistance Command-Vietnam Studies and Observations Group (MACV-SOG) soldier.
 

**ed: Sauilius "Sonny" Puzikas was an ex operator in the Soviet Military and is a combat and fighting expert.