14 DAY TRIAL // The existence of Call of Duty: Black Ops II might be official, but there are still some details that the developer Treyarch and publisher Activision Blizzard are keen to keep under wraps, including the exact identity of the enemies the player will have to battle in the various missions.
Mark Lamia, the leader of developer Treyarch and the main developer behind Black Ops II, told Kotaku that “As the proxy war conflicts occur you might encounter these SCO forces. Maybe they’ll be a part of the multiplayer. Who knows?”
Lamia clarified that the main villain was Raul Menendez, a lone criminal mastermind able to hack the robotic and drone forces that the United States maintains in order to create chaos and further his own plans.
But players will at certain points fight forces from the Shanghai Cooperation Organization who are reacting to apparent attacks coming from the United States.
The only potential problem with the fiction that Treyarch is creating for Black Ops II is that the SCO is a real-world organization and its members might object to the way it is portrayed, although it is clearly fictional.
The SCO was formed in 1996 by the leaders of China, Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan, as a mutual security organization that followed most of the template of NATO.
Uzbekistan joined in 2001 and since then India, Mongolia, Pakistan and Iran have served as observers.
The members of the organization have pledged to collaborate in such areas as security, military projects, foreign affairs, economics and transportation and a number of analysts see the SCO as one of the rising powers of the near future, although it is unlikely it will become an integrated organization like the European Union.
Call of Duty: Black Ops II will be launched on November 13 on the PC, the Xbox 360 and the PlayStation 3.