14 DAY TRIAL // Call of Duty: Black Ops II has finally been revealed to the world at the beginning of the month and, given the fact that it now takes place in the near future, developer Treyarch is confident that this will lead to quite a lot of innovation for the franchise.
Call of Duty games may have originally been set in World War II, but with the arrival of Modern Warfare, they now take place in contemporary times.
With the upcoming Black Ops II, the franchise is taking a jump into the future, as its action is now set in 2025, despite the fact that the first Black Ops took place in the 1960s, during the Cold War.
Talking about this major change with GamesMaster magazine, via CVG, Treyarch boss Mark Lamia said that the jump in time was decided upon when work on Black Ops 1 was complete.
"It was actually something that we've talked about doing for a while," he said. "We settled on it about the time of Black Ops' [development] ending.”
This jump was perfect for Black Ops, as its name doesn’t really tie it to a specific time frame.
"We'd just made this Black Ops fiction. And as you know, it isn't called Cold Warfare, it's called Black Ops, which doesn't denote any particular time period. That was intentional on our part when we were creating it, because Black Ops exist in the past, they exist in modern day, and presumably they exist in the future," Lamia said.
"So from the beginning, we wanted to take this game to the future. What that future was and how it was defined took a little bit of time [to settle on]," he added.
The Treyarch boss also highlighted that these jumps in time led to a lot more innovation inside the studio, so they were ideal to keep things fresh.
"We wanted to do new sorts of gameplay and we wanted to have new experiences. We saw what happened when we went from World War II to a completely different era inside the studio: there was all this new creativity. And so we wanted some of that again."
Call of Duty: Black Ops II is out for the PC, PS3, and Xbox 360 on November 13.