14 DAY TRIAL // Call of Duty: Black Ops II has been revealed earlier this month and, as we saw, it’s going to bring a lot of new features. This is largely owed to the desire of developer Treyarch to rewrite the rulebook of the franchise by implementing many new things.
Call of Duty: Black Ops II is set to be much more than just another yearly installment of the franchise, as Treyarch, the studio behind the upcoming game is adding all sorts of new features. Chief among these is a well-known role-playing game mechanic of branching storylines, in which the decisions of the players impact the ending of the game and the fate of different non-playable characters.
According to the game’s director, David Anthony, these array of changes are stemming from the creativity of the Treyarch team and the desire to make Black Ops II something completely out of the ordinary.
"At the start of Black Ops 2 we had this team ready to roll from day one, so we wanted to be more ambitious than we've ever been in anything we've ever worked on. Right from the word go, we rewrote the rules - what could we do differently to raise peoples' expectations right from the start? So this is in our DNA; this is how we are approaching this game," he told CVG.
The story is where Black Ops II players will find the most surprises, as Anthony is once again collaborating with Hollywood screenwriter David Goyer to really flesh out the narrative and make players invest themselves in the single-player campaign.
"One of the ways we have been most ambitious is in terms of story. I worked with Hollywood screenwriter David Goyer for about the last three months editing the story on the first Black Ops, and we had a really great time. He genuinely enjoyed it, describing the experience as the most fun he'd had since film school 20 years ago."
"So we got to the end of the first Black Ops and he's like 'Dave, I want to work on the next one from the start. We've taken some risks on the first Black Ops; now let's rewrite the rules about storytelling in games.' So right from the start it wasn't a case of thinking how far do we needed to go to satisfy peoples' expectations... we're not even thinking about that. We just want to rewrite the rulebook."
This rewrite process is pretty massive, as Black Ops II is adding a branching storyline mechanic that is unheard of in Call of Duty series.
You can admire all these changes this November, when the game is launched on PC, PS3 and Xbox 360.