‘Call of Duty: Black Ops 3’ is fast, frantic and adds a co-op campaign

Developer Treyarch has a good record of keeping things fresh in Call of Duty. The company started working on the franchise back in 2005. With World at War it added zombies, Black Ops went to Vietnam, Black Ops 2 traversed time and added branching narratives. For its next installment, Treyarch is, once again, trying something new. Call of Duty: Black Ops 3 (set to arrive November 6 on PC, Xbox One and PS4) brings campaign co-op to the franchise for the first time. The entire campaign will be playable co-operatively by up to four players online (or two players locally). The addition of up to three campaign players meant building bigger combat arenas, better AI, and adding social features for showing off medals and achievements.

“This Call of Duty campaign is all about choice. Your investment in your character is going to mean something more than it ever has before in any Call of Duty game,” Studio Head Mark Lamia says. He hopes that with upgradeable abilities and the opportunity to play campaign missions with friends will lead to more replayability in the game’s narrative-driven mode. “Narratively? It’s just mind fuckery,” Lamia laughs, saying he wants to keep a shroud of mystery around the story in Black Ops 3. What is known is the campaign will continue the story of Black Ops 2, in a near-future war where soldiers have begun to augment their bodies to become more lethal killing machines.

For the first time in the franchise’s history, the campaign’s protagonist is fully customizable. In addition to upgrading abilities, changing your character’s appearance and tweaking weapons, players can pick the gender of their Call of Duty hero. “It’s not just a female head on a male body. It’s a different set of animations for the entire game,” Lamia says. Character interaction will even differ based on the protagonist’s gender. “We knew we were going to do fully unique male, fully unique female for all scenes and all the customization that goes for both. Thank God for Blu-ray, right?” Campaign Director and Senior Executive Producer, Jason Blundell, jokes, adding the game’s protagonist is fully voiced regardless of gender.

There are more tricks up Treyarch’s sleeve for its sixth Call of Duty title. While much of the game is still “classified,” Lamia was quick to tease the game’s core features during a day-long reveal meeting at its Santa Monica studio. For example, the return of Zombies mode, which will include a dedicated progression system and be more accessible to players that found previous iterations too difficult.

Game Design Director, David Vonderhaar, says there is renewed focus on “winding the combat loop extremely tight” for the multiplayer mode in Black Ops 3. The loop, as he calls it, refers to continuous combat action. Anything that slows down the pace of action has been deleted, Vonderhaar says.

The first major shift is the removal of sprint limitations. While unlimited sprint had been a special elite upgrade in the past, it is now the norm for all. Jumping over objects has been overhauled as well, as a player moves toward cover they will now automatically mantle over it regardless of the angle (whether the cover be in front, behind or to the side) without relinquishing weapon control. You can aim down sights as you move over objects now. Traversal, Vonderhaar says, can cut into what he calls “Call of Duty time.” You don’t have time to run up to a piece of cover, look down, press a button to vault and make it to the other side. In game, that motion takes split seconds, but it only takes split seconds to be killed.

“Thrust-assisted jump” is the second major change in Treyarch’s Call of Duty multiplayer overhaul. A slow-burning meter tracks Black Ops 3’s thruster, which allows players to gain altitude and boost in any direction. The thrusters here feel more natural than the sudden momentum changes found in Advanced Warfare.

Power sliding is another new addition. The slide’s boost of speed makes movement far faster than before, while never taking weapon or equipment control away from the player. You could, for example, slide around the corner staring down the sights of a sniper rifle for a devious trick shot.

Following the lead of other recent shooters, such as Titanfall, Black Ops 3 adds wall running. It too maintains the game’s philosophy of never taking control away from players. As you run across walls you still have full access to your weapons (hip-fire or aiming down the sights) and equipment (you can plant explosives on the wall as you run across them).

The last addition is some what puzzling: Swimming. Nobody was clamoring for the ability to backstroke through a round of Call of Duty, but it does add another layer to the complex game world. Movement underwater is slightly slower, but you still maintain complete control of your weapons and other equipment. Since only one of the maps available during our demo had an underwater component, it’s tough to judge whether it will drastically affect gameplay.

Timing of the new traversal options — chaining an unlimited sprint, into a power slide around a corner, into a thrust jump toward a wall, and then zigzagging through structures — took less time to get used to than you’d think. These are fundamental changes to the speed and pacing of way Call of Duty matches progress, adding a new sense of complexity to both strategy and danger. Vonderhaar says the new features allowed Treyarch to reexamine how it creates multiplayer maps. Now there are elevated plateaus to reach with boosts, underground canals to fight over while swimming, dangerous paths to wall run in between.

There are still a handful of familiar features found within Black Ops 3’s multiplayer. Player and weapon progression is still the driving force behind multiplayer replayability. Black Ops 3 attempts a few new wrinkles, including a gunsmith mode, which allows players to build unique-looking weapons in an attempt to give some identity to the inanimate objects.

Treyarch is also introducing Specialists. Black Ops 3 Specialists are pre-set characters in multiplayer with a unique name and backstory. Of the nine that will be available in the game, Treyarch revealed four. Each character offers a unique play style and has a devastating special weapon, such as the Outrider’s compound bow, and an ability, like Ruin’s speed boost. However, players can only bring either the weapon or special ability into combat.

“I think one of the things that makes Call of Duty, year after year, interesting and exciting is [each game in the franchise is] not the same. I mean, there could be things that are the same but each team has the ability to drive its own vision,” Lamia says. Even though Lamia emphatically proclaims Black Ops 3 is “the deepest and richest Call of Duty ever,” Treyarch is eager to prove it. For the first time since 2008’s World at War, Activision will give players an opportunity to beta test Call of Duty. The publisher says the beta will be available to pre-order customers on PC, Xbox One and PS4 — though it wouldn’t confirm any timed exclusivity for Xbox One owners, which is generally how franchise content is distributed.

“This being our third Black Ops game, we like to look at this as ‘the best of everything’ we’ve had, going back even a decade,” Lamia says. “That’s what Black Ops 3 is all about.”

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‘Mortal Kombat X’ and the comedy of violence

Mortal Kombat is synonymous with violence — hell, it’s baked into the franchise’s name. But despite how increasingly gruesome the series has become with each successive release throughout its 23-year history, it hasn’t lost sight of keeping the tone light as a counterbalance. Whether that’s a head popping up saying, “Toasty!” in falsetto after a particularly brutal uppercut, or turning an opponent into a crying baby that slips on a puddle of frozen urine at the end of a match, humor is just as intrinsic to the game as its bloodshed. What the series delivers is cartoony, over-the-top violence akin to the B-movie horror of something like Peter Jackson’s Dead Alive. Fatalities, Mortal Kombat‘s signature, end-of-match moves, are shockingly gory, for sure, but somehow developer NetherRealm keeps the game from feeling like torture porn.

“We’re not out trying to make Saw or a horror film,” says NetherRealm Lead Designer John Edwards. “We don’t take ourselves too seriously.”

To understand where the series’ newest installment, Mortal Kombat X, gets its groin-exploding levels of violence from, though, you need to take a look at where it all started: the arcade.

Back in the early ’90s, arcade games didn’t have the multimillion-dollar ad campaigns afforded to modern releases, so to stand out from the crowd they needed to be bigger and louder than whatever cabinet was closest. “You have to hit people over the head with something that gets them to put a quarter in,” says Dave Lang, CEO of Divekick and Killer Instinct developer Iron Galaxy Studios.

Lang worked as the studio tech director at Midway Chicago, MK‘s original developer, before the company dissolved due to bankruptcy in 2009. As he tells it, humor was a key factor to all of the games that came out of the studio: NFL Blitz, NARC, Revolution X, NBA Jam and, yes, Mortal Kombat.

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“Mortal Kombat in general is the byproduct of kids in their 20s (us, 20 years ago) who grew up on ’80s and ’90s movies,” says series co-creator and NetherRealm Creative Director Ed Boon. He cites hyper-violent action movies Terminator, Predator, Enter the Dragon and Bloodsport as direct influences, and it’s easy to see how those made their way into the game. Consider the obvious example of Mortal Kombat‘s Johnny Cage, the not-quite-Jean-Claude-Van-Damme character. In general, though, it’s mostly the over-the-top tone that ran rampant in 1980s cinema that pervades Mortal Kombat.

“Mortal Kombat is the byproduct of kids in their 20s who grew up on ’80s and ’90s movies,” says series co-creator and NetherRealm Creative Director Ed Boon.

That level of nonstop violence is what makes the game so fun to watch — it’s the most brutal form of slapstick you’ll likely ever witness. It’s also relentless. Mortal Kombat‘s trademark fatalities and other vicious combos are entertaining precisely because they don’t stop. For example, one of character Cassie Cage’s fatalities starts with her kneecapping an opponent and then shooting them in the skull with a pistol.

Had NetherRealm stopped there, the resulting move probably would feel a lot darker than the actual end result. But that’s where the levity, and the absurdity, of Mortal Kombat‘s violence comes into play: Cage, drenched by the still-spraying blood of her opponent’s fresh wound, walks up and blows a bubble with her chewing gum. She then pulls the bubblegum from her mouth and plugs up the spurting wound. But that’s not all. With no other outlet for the blood to go, it fills up in her opponent’s head, blows a bubble of its own and then pops. Gross? Definitely. Upsetting? Not so much.

“We want people to cringe and then laugh about it at the end,” says Edwards. “We never really try to shock someone and then leave it at that.”

Boon agrees.

“The fatalities we have in the game are so over the top, 95 percent of the responses we get are laughter,” he says. “It’s like the Evil Dead movies: You can’t take it seriously.

“If that ingredient [humor] wasn’t there, it’d be a really dark game,” Boon says, laughing.

“When you’re working on a franchise for that long, it becomes ingrained in the culture of the studio,” Edwards says. “These are the things we do; these are the things we don’t do.”

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What’s more, keeping MK‘s tone consistent apparently isn’t all that difficult. Fatalities are a team effort and everyone at the studio is welcome to pitch their ideas. With so much veteran talent in every department and a team that’s worked on the series for over two decades, the boundaries of what’s appropriate are already pretty well-known.

“We want people to cringe and then laugh about it at the end,” says Edwards.

When I ask Boon if there’s a line that wouldn’t get crossed in terms of violence, his tone shifts dramatically, going from jovial to sober.

“Absolutely. We have these meetings where we come up with ideas, and inevitably somebody will say something where we go: ‘That’s not funny. That’s crossing some kind of difficult-to-define line.’” Boon agrees that the line is similar to Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart’s 1964 attempt to define hardcore porn as a hard-to-describe, but “I know it when I see it” thing.

“We all know when it’s crossed,” Boon says.

For example, a fatality that involves slashing an opponent’s wrists and then watching them bleed out would never make it into a Mortal Kombat game because real-world violence doesn’t have a place in the series. Unless you happen to be a mystic ninja who can control fire, chances are you won’t be blowing a hole through an enemy’s torso with a fireball and slicing the front of their face off with a sword anytime soon. It’s comic book or cartoon violence the team is after — not realism.

“We try to not do things that are gratuitously cruel or realistic just for the sake of shock value,” says Edwards. “Our shock value is more like ‘Hey, that’s impossible, but look how cool and creepy it looks.’”

Johnny Cage’s Jack Torrance impression starts at the 1:10 mark.

And speaking of how it looks, that evolution in graphical fidelity is really what drives the game’s gore system forward. The fatalities that sent former First Lady Hillary Clinton and former Sen. Joe Lieberman into a tizzy in 1993, and spurred the creation of the Entertainment Software Ratings Board, are nothing compared to what’s in 2015’s Mortal Kombat X. That doesn’t mean the team is doing stuff it wouldn’t have 10 or 20 years ago; it just means there are few, if any, tech roadblocks in the way.

Whereas two decades ago, ice-ninja Sub-Zero ripping an opponent’s pixelated head off (with their spine still attached) pushed the limits of arcade hardware and home consoles, now he can shoot an ice ball at an opponent’s gut, shatter it, reach inside their gaping torso, break their spine in two and then rip their body in half horizontally. And yes, that’s totally something you can do with a few button presses in this week’s Mortal Kombat X.

“It’s obviously something to just get a response out of you. I don’t know how you can get mad about that,” says Lang. “It’s brutal, but not cruel.”

“I don’t think we’re doing anything that’s any different than what we’ve done in the past,” Edwards says. “Obviously we’re able to do more, cooler things based on tech, but we’ve kept the same personality and style throughout all the games.”

Mortal Kombat X isn’t a massacre-simulator like the controversial PC game Hatred. Instead, it embraces the idea of grotesque violent comedy and puts the player in control of the slapstick. When Mortal Kombat‘s Johnny Cage peers through an opponent’s ribcage saying, “Heeeere’s Johnny!” it’s the equivalent of metal band Gwar’s Oderus Urungus force-feeding a fan to Gor-Gor the Dinosaur; it’s silly and stupid and intentionally absurd.

“I’ve watched on Twitter whenever they’ve released a [Mortal Kombat] trailer and there’s a predictable backlash,” Lang says. “I just don’t get it at all; it’s just so obviously over-the-top, ridiculous and impossible. It’s obviously something to just get a response out of you. I don’t know how you can get mad about that. It’s brutal, but not cruel.”

Edgar Alvarez contributed to this report

[Image credit: NetherRealm/Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment]

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‘Deus Ex: Mankind Divided’ pre-orders live now

Pre-orders for Deus Ex: Mankind Divided are live today via the game’s official site, open to pure humans and transhumans alike. (The site is down at the moment, but it should be “back soon”). Mankind Divided is in development for PS4, Xbox One and PC, and it doesn’t have an official release date. Yes, you can pre-order a game that was revealed, without many details, just minutes ago and that doesn’t yet have a release date. Welcome to the future.

Mankind Divided is the follow-up to Deus Ex: Human Revolution and it’s set two years after that game, in 2029, when people with technologically augmented bodies are at war with unaltered humans. Details about the game leaked yesterday, right in the middle of Square Enix and Eidos Montreal’s days-long teaser campaign featuring a Twitch stream of a man locked in a futuristic-looking cell. He spoke of transhumans forced to live in ghettoes and he vowed to fight for freedom. “We are stronger, faster, smarter,” the man read to the camera. “We have transcended our fears and because of this you have declared war. And so we will fight for the respect we deserve.”

Mankind Divided will have a heavy focus on player choice, and this idea was integrated into the Twitch teaser: At one point, viewers decided if the man should “resist” or “collaborate” with his captors by typing their choices into the chat (they chose “resist”). Square Enix officially revealed Mankind Divided with a pretty, action-packed, CG trailer, which you can view below.

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Source: Square Enix

‘Skullgirls’ on PS4 will let you brawl with your PS3 friends

If you were quick to buy a PlayStation 4 or Xbox One, you’ve probably had that horrible moment when you realized that your friends with last-generation systems couldn’t join you in online games. You won’t have to leave them behind when Skullgirls arrives, however. The fighting game’s senior animator, Jonathan Kim, has confirmed that the PS4 version will let you take on PS3 opponents. The notion of a cross-platform strategy isn’t completely new, since titles like Guilty Gear Xrd Sign do it. Still, it’s helping to establish a welcome trend — you may not always have to abandon your favorite players to get a new console, or feel pressured to upgrade just to keep up with the Joneses.

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Via: NeoGAF

Source: Jonathan Kim (Twitter)