14 DAY TRIAL // Developers at Treyarch, the creators of Call of Duty: Black Ops, have said that the balancing process on their latest video game has been harder than for any of the other products that they have launched in the past for the franchise.
The difficulties are linked to the enhanced multiplayer component that Black Ops will have, including a bigger variety of weapons, linked to the move to the Cold War period, and the addition of the Call of Duty Points system, designed to allow gamers to get access to some perks and kill streaks without going up in level.
Josh Olin, who is the community manager of Treyarch, has told CVG that, “It has been a much more difficult game to balance but the team really stepped up to the plate. This has been the most difficult to balance and there are a lot of things that contribute to that such as the earn rate and spend rate of CoD points, plus XP is always a tough thing to balance out.”
He added, “With all these things we’re adding to purchase you have to balance not only the weapons and perks against each other but also when you consider how much they’re going to cost.”
The Treyarch community manager also suggested that for the foreseeable future the studio would only work on titles in the Call of Duty series, saying that they now have separate teams working on the single player and the multiplayer, making it easier to create a complex experiences that are balanced and complement each other.
Call of Duty: Black Ops is published by Activision and will be launched for the PC, the PlayStation 3 from Sony, the Xbox 360 from Microsoft and the Nintendo Wii on November 2010.
Activision hopes that the game will manage to sell better than Modern Warfare 2 did last year and become the best selling title of 2010.