The new Call of Duty: Black Ops installment will take place 40 years after the last game. A Treyarch developer described the new game’s story to be “twisted,” and the players will be hooked into the story. According to a GameSpot interview with David Vonderhaar, the studio design director, stated “A lot of the mystery of the latest trailer and all the story stuff is there because there is some really screwed up mind-f***ery going to happen to you when you play the game. That’s the Black Ops narrative, that’s intentional in design.” Vonderhaar continued to say,
We’re doing that on purpose because that’s the Black Ops way, right? This is covert ops. This is, “I’m not sure what’s going on with me right now, I’m not who I think I am. Are all these things normal?” This is an important part of storytelling, and I will not give it away. But it’s not hard to understand the story. You’re a Black Ops operative. Your counterparts have gone off the grid in a world where you’re connected and wired all the time. There’s a huge leak of military intelligence and you’re sent in to investigate that. So we set it up that way and we send you up and along the way, we untangle a huge weavy story; a very deep, very dark, and sometimes really twisted narrative experience.”
The Call of Duty: Black Ops III story trailer released on September 30th further, supports Vonderhaar’s claim. In the trailer the Black Ops equip themselves with new technology, Direct Neural Interface, that seems to be affecting their brain in many ways. The developers designing the weapons will be predicting how the weapons will evolve by the year 2065 for their game.
Vanderhaar says, “They’ll turn themselves into futurists so that they put the weapons where they would be in 2065 in our timeline, which is a very distinct timeline. Someone else’s 2065 might be very different than the Treyarch Black Ops 2065.” He also says that Treyarch will do their best to keep everything as grounded as possible, but they may take certain liberties for the story’s sake. Vonderhaar states, ” All the augmentation in the game, and that whole theme, is not unrealistic. It’s actually quite plausible. You can see the roots of that stuff right now.” It will be interesting to see what kind of weapons and other technological improvements will work their way into the game.
Call of Duty: Black Ops III launches on November 6th, and will be available for the PS3, PS4, Xbox 360, Xbox One, and PC. The PS3 and Xbox 360 versions will not have a campaign mode, and this will be pointed out on the game’s box. Call of Duty: Black Ops 3 will also have four player co-op in the campaign mode. I support any studios choice to put co-op, preferably split screen co-op, into a video game. I think Call of Duty: Black Ops III will be a very compelling and fun game to play.