14 DAY TRIAL // Activision, as the publisher, and Treyarch, as the developer, have confirmed that they plan to launch Call of Duty: Black Ops on November 9 for the Xbox 360 from Microsoft, the PlayStation 3 from Sony and the PC, presumably through Steam. But apart from a slick trailer suggesting the missions will take the player all over the world and all through the timeline of the Cold War, little was actually revealed about the game itself.
Now, an initial look in USA Today brings in two or three very interesting details. The most important of them is that the story itself is being built with cooperative play in mid, allowing up to four players to experience the missions.
The main focus will be on two as of yet undisclosed characters that will get to experience “multiple covert international conflicts.” Expect a lot of flashbacks and probably a lot of secondary characters dying in what is becoming pretty much a tradition in recent Call of Duty titles.
It also seems players will be getting more of a taste of the flying life as one of the missions is built around the SR-71 Blackbird, the so-called invisible plane. The gamer will use the surveillance equipment of the aircraft to watch the battlefield and to direct their squad mates to their objectives while keeping them safe from threats deep in the Ural mountains.
It's also interesting to see that Treyarch is not afraid of taking the players to Russia itself, suggesting that Black Ops will not be focusing only on peripheral zones of conflict between the United States and Soviet Russia, like Vietnam and Cuba. The Cold war can be a touchy subject in the current international climate so it will be a challenge for Activision and Treyarch to create interesting combat scenarios while not causing any real time political incidents through its fictional stages.