Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 - The Bear and Badger

I_R

Futuristic, which is unexpected. Shows why they've stuck to present day and historical settings for so long, because the trailer actually looks pretty poor compared to their usual efforts.

humantarget

That looks dreadful. I think it's definitely time to stop with the CoD franchise, artistically anyway. I'm sure they'll still make a shit ton of cash with it.

Mod74

The weaponised Big Dog looked quite cool. Other than that...meh. I've always had a soft spot for the COD campaigns so I'm sure I'll play it at some point.

Bollockoff

All that near-future tech malarkey and the thing that caught my eye the most in the trailer as something i'd enjoy was the horse riding. Brazen time period switching is a cop-out for unimaginative dunces.

After i'd played CoD 1 and 2 on PC I was wondering where the series would go. And as a youngster I was hoping IW would carry on basing the games on the conflicts of history. A game that hops through different characters and nations of the 80s.

Experience the Falklands, the Soviets in Afghanistan and so on. I was looking forward to being educated since none of that shit was taught in school when I was there.

Speedhaak

humantarget said:
That looks dreadful. I think it's definitely time to stop with the CoD franchise, artistically anyway. I'm sure they'll still make a shit ton of cash with it.

You think? It was time to put a bullet in that franchise years ago...

M0stly harm13ss

Detail on the game copied from GiantBomb

".........something about the story and China vs USA being the main campaign.....

It wasn't until I started thinking about writing this story, for example, that I decided to finally toss Modern Warfare 3 back in to download all the maps and stuff that had come as a part of the Call of Duty Elite subscription that I definitely wasn't using. And as far as the actual gameplay and multiplayer is concerned, I suppose I'm still on the fence. But after hearing Treyarch's pitch for its story and the sorts of things the studio has planned for Black Ops II's campaign, I'm definitely excited enough to look forward to seeing how the next chapter from Frank Woods, Alex Mason, and Jason Hudson. Their story, though, will play out in the 1980s.

The bulk of Black Ops II will put you in the boots of David Mason, son of Alex Mason, who ran the show in the previous game. The younger Mason is hunting down a bad guy by the name of Raoul Menendez, who first started stirring up trouble when Reagan was in office. The game will open with David Mason heading to a CIA facility known as "The Vault," where the agency keeps people who are too important or crazy to be walking around the streets. It's here where Mason finds Frank Woods and confronts him about his and Alex Mason's past with Menendez. This sends the game flashing back to "old" Cold War as you'll see 1980s Afghanistan and other hot spots that show you what the original Black Ops crew did after Vietnam. Rather than giving you all of the '80s stuff up front, the game will flash back and forth between the past and the future, where Menendez has become the type of action movie villain that would take control of the entire US drone fleet and turn it against both us and China.

So what will warfare look like in 2025? Well, for starters it'll look a whole lot nicer. Treyarch has put in a lot of work on the renderer, and overall, the whole game looks a lot sharper and more detailed, while still running at 60 frames per second. Facial animations looked especially nice, better showing off some of the performance capture that the team has been doing, which includes mocapping horses for that '80s Afghanistan level. But there are plenty of more futuristic things to deal with, as well. In 2025, unmanned drones will apparently rule the battlefield, giving you more targets to shoot at that aren't just your standard soldier. In the downtown Los Angeles level that was shown, Mason went up against the CLAW (Cognitive Land Assault Weapon), which looked like a big, bear-sized robot with a turret mounted on its back. You'll be able to get in on the action, too, by deploying quadcopters with extra-mini miniguns mounted on them. You'll be able to order your drones around a bit with new squad controls. Grenades also look a little different, so in Treyarch's future you'll be launching grenades out of an arm-mounted cannon.

OK, what's the other big knock against the Call of Duty franchise? Seriously, when you're on a message board talking mess about it, what's the thing that everyone brings up? Right, the scripted part where it's totally on-rails and almost completely out of your control. That part is also being addressed in a few ways, which means that Black Ops II will have a branching campaign with multiple outcomes--or at least varying shades of a similar outcome. It's hard to get a read on how different things will actually be in the final game. Some of these changes are extremely simple--for example, the Los Angeles mission has two on-screen icons at one point, allowing you to either rappel down from a broken freeway to help cover the President as she makes her way through an increasingly-hot battlefield or you can choose to stay up on the freeway and snipe as the rest of your crew covers her escape. That sniper rifle, by the way, can see targets through walls and penetrate cover via a charged-up shot that expends more ammo than a standard shot.

That's a minor change, obviously. But it gets bigger. Things you do in the game will impact the overall state of the United States' cold war with China as well as the level of success that Menendez achieves. Some of these changes will be choice-based, but others will hinge on player skill. The clearest example of that on display to us was a Strike Force mission, which takes the campaign in a pretty different direction. These missions are attached to the story, but put you in the role of a team of SEALs who are out to capture a set of objectives. How you achieve these objectives is sort of up to you, giving the game a bit of a sandbox vibe, but overall it looked like a multiplayer sort of map overhauled to give it a set of single-player objectives--points that need to be captured, and so on. If you like, you can stay in the role of a soldier and run around, just like any other Call of Duty game. But you can also pop out of that soldier and get above the battle in "overwatch" mode. From above, you can order your forces around the map like a mini-RTS or pop into any unit to take direct control. This means you can directly control quadcopters, assault drones, and other non-human units. If the unit you're controlling is destroyed, you'll have to find a new unit to control and play continues as normal. But here's the catch: if you run out of units, you fail the mission and the action continues on. Those SEALs didn't capture that objective, and that will have some sort of impact on the overall story. You'll certainly be able to take multiple attempts at the Strike Force scenarios in case you want to ensure a specific outcome, but the idea of hitting a fail state and continuing onward is pretty exciting. At the very least, it's definitely not something I was expecting to find in a Call of Duty game.

When you finish the campaign and see "your" ending, the game will give you some sort of indication as to the points in the game that put you on that course, with the goal being to drive people to play the campaign more than once to see what changes if you play it differently. Again, this isn't the sort of thing that is completely foreign to video games, but in the context of a Call of Duty game, it sounds pretty cool. That Los Angeles level also has you freely flying a VTOL jet in jet mode above downtown LA as you attempt to keep the hacked drones off of the President. It doesn't look like the sort of thing that turns the action into a full-on flight simulator, but it definitely looks more dynamic than some of the diversions that have popped up in previous COD games.

So what about the multiplayer? Other than confirming that all the MP will be set in 2025, they're not really talking about that right now. But the goal for the multiplayer team is to revisit every single system and rebuild any that need rebuilding. This sounds like it could be more than the typical annual shift in how the progression works and what sort of perks you can equip, but it's hard to say. The team is attempting to build a multiplayer game that allows the people who just want to get in and shoot stuff up with their friends to have a good time without alienating the budding professional crowd that wants to shoot people in the face at MLG events. Combat Training will return and Zombies will also return as its own full mode.

Without more hard details on how the multiplayer mode is coming along, it's hard to know if Black Ops II will recapture the hearts and minds of lapsed fans like myself. But I can definitely say that I'm very interested in seeing how Treyarch's campaign ideas play out. Unsurprisingly, we'll all be able to find out in November... assuming that some fiendish villain hasn't taken over or our own unmanned Predator drones and bombed us all back to the Stone Age before then, of course."

So, some change anyway I suppose. However, no change from the last two games for me. Pick it up (probably via Lovefim) wander through the campaign, don't touch the multiplayer.

Dan_Dare

Those changes to the campaign do sound good but we all know exactly how it'll play on the ground, which is really dull.

I_R

Even the previews from the point of view of a disillusioned fan have become over familiar.

Aaroncupboard

Mod74 said:
The weaponised Big Dog looked quite cool. Other than that...meh. I've always had a soft spot for the COD campaigns so I'm sure I'll play it at some point.

I have to agree. I've always enjoyed a COD campaign. I tend to even do them on veteran afterwards. Saying that, this doesn't look great. The horses look interesting, otherwise it actually didn't impress me too much.

[Deleted User]

Veteran eh, get you.

g.man

The first Black Ops was one of the worst fps I've ever had the misfortune to try and play through. It was more like Virrua Cop...only spectacularly shit. Won't be touching this one with a shitty stick.

tbh

g.man

Aaroncupboard

XTC_NRG_4_DARKRAVER said:
Veteran eh, get you.

I tried to make it sound good but...it really isn't much of an achievement!

stormyskiesahead

The first Black Ops was one of the worst fps I've ever had the misfortune to try and play through. It was more like Virrua Cop...only spectacularly shit. Won't be touching this one with a shitty stick.

tbh

g.man

This. Exactly this.

LazyGunn

No means no, no always means no, all roads go to no no no

I_R

Surprisingly shiny - might be the PC version. I can see why they've taken the risk and gone futuristic though, lots of toys for the MP.

Paul the sparky

Pass.

[Deleted User]

fuck that, looks worse than ever.........if thats even possible.

Mod74

In game menu's are sexy.

What was that e-sports shit at the end?

e-sports, I guess.

Mod74

In answer to my question

http://www.joystiq.com/2012/08/14/black-ops-2-features-in-game-livestreaming-and-shoutcasting/

Whatever you think about the series that's some interesting tech right there.

I_R

I'd be worried about lag, but I suppose they need to get this stuff sorted before next gen hardware arrives and people start expecting it. They do seem to be throwing in some changes this time, no doubt the sales of BF3 have started the alarm bells ringing.

[Deleted User]

I'm in. Day one. Don't think I'll bother with the campaign.

Subbax

No doubt I'll end up getting this on day one.

rickjoyce

The hate for this series is pretty unreal. I've been enjoying MW3 quite a bit in the special ops and survival modes. Sure, it sells too much but most of the series' are above average shooters. The campaign in the first Black ops was really bad though. Besides the stupid napalm barrel dropping sequence which made no sense, I encountered two pretty serious bugs. I can only really remember that Ice Cube got stuck in his canned animation and the mission couldn't finish without him (checkpoint reload also did nothing). This after 45 minutes of gruelling pacing through a veteran mission. I already waste my time on games, don't waste my wasted time!

pantyfire

It's been a while since I played a CoD online but the multip was always pretty damn solid animation wise.
I got this vid from gametrailers and is it me or does the character animation look terrible?
http://www.gametrailers.com/videos/g0hbcl/call-of-duty--black-ops-ii-gc-2012--cargo-map-team-deathmatch-gameplay--stream-
Very second rate IMO.
Plus seing as it was a LAN match there appeared to be a few lag kills in there. OK one or two were through thin cover but at least one guy is getting kills as people have run past cargo containers where they should have been safe. just seemed a bit 'off' to me.

Moto70

I've already pre-ordered (again from Sainsbury's using the 20% off code) but this time around I am only buying 1 copy and that is for my son. I am done with CoD, I got burnt with MW3 and I've seen there is at least the same , if not more, shit happening in BlOps 2.

CoD was just like a relationship, started off brilliantly, a few moments but mostly tedium and ending with absolute hatred. I'll always have a soft spot for CoD4 but absolute loathing for the rest...

Moto70

BlOps II expensive edition features a Dragonfire Drone...

[Deleted User]

I'm still in for BlOps 2. I rebought MW3 again and I'm actually enjoying its MP more than I did when it first came out.
I've never really got on with Battlefield, it feels less solid to me.
CoD covers my occasional urge to drop into FFA for half an hour or so. BlOps2's future soldiering looks fun.

Moto70

XTC_NRG_4_DARKRAVER wrote:

I've never really got on with Battlefield, it feels less solid to me.

CoD does have the best 'feel' of any FPS imo but the small maps and, ultimately, the twitch shooting combined with all the other shit that goes ruined it for me. I think there would still be a place for a less cluttered FPS, in fact (and I never thought I'd hear myself say this) I'd welcome a return to WWII...

Bollockoff

I should be getting a hands on with this on wednesday.

[Deleted User]

I just equip a launcher now instead of a pistol and take out what's annoying me.

Moto70

Bollockoff wrote:

I should be getting a hands on with this on wednesday.

A few years ago I would have been jealous as fuck but MW3 severed any feelings I have for CoD.

Playing it Wednesday? I wouldn't even want my own copy of this on Wednesday...

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