Call of Duty: Black Ops III’s designers on underwater guns and MOBA-like play (interview, part 3)

Above: Call of Duty: Black Ops III

Image Credit: Activision

GamesBeat: You can’t really take a gun a shoot it underwater, can you?

Dan Bunting: It’s funny. Every one of these crazy ideas we come up with, we do fact-checking, just to keep it grounded in reality.

Lamia: Hang on. Overriding it all, it has to be fun. We do follow the fun. We are making a game. Here’s the deal. This is clearly fiction. But it does actually — you’d be surprised at the amount of research they go through, or that I make them go through when I say, “Really?”

Of course, whatever we do it has to fit with the game, but we want to make it fun. We don’t start from fiction. We start from fun with a lot of the multiplayer stuff. Jason likes to talk about starting with the fiction to help guide some of the fun, put some boundaries in. He has a different issue. He has to immerse people in the fiction. Not that Dan doesn’t have that problem, but …

Bunting: Fact is stranger than fiction.

Lamia: This is true too.

Bunting: If you start doing research, there are thing people are actually doing today that will blow your mind. I just read an article about these bio-hackers augmenting their eyes for night vision. They’re injecting their eyes with some kind of crazy photosensitive solution.

Lamia: They’re talking about ocular implants now. If you get an ocular implant and it has a wireless connection, you’ll start getting data from it. Some of these things, we do put one and one together and try to make two out of that. That’s the creative part.

Bunting: There is debate internally. “Okay, you can’t shoot guns underwater.” When the challenge came up to me, I went out and I found it’s not the one everyone looks at. It’s not the Russian prototype weapon that’s been around since the ‘80s. There’s actually a prototype bullet being developed that can be shot from any gun underwater. I clicked on that link, put it in an email, sent it to them, and said, “Here you go.”

Lamia: Really? In 30 years, yeah!

GamesBeat: When you pick your specialists for multiplayer, is that what you appear as for the entire game, or do you sort of turn into that character once you activate …

Bunting: That is who you are for the entire game. This goes back to some of the points we went through in the presentation about how we’re fascinated and enamored with this idea of visualizing the player’s gameplay choices in the match. When you see the Reaper — I don’t think any of you were confused when you saw the Reaper. You knew he’s going to have the minigun or the flashback ability. Through the course of the match, you learn which choices — you see the gamertag over his head and you think, “Okay, that guy has the minigun. I’m gonna watch out for him next time I go to cap the B point.”

That visualization and identification of the gameplay choices people have made is really important to this game. We want players to know exactly what’s going to happen when somebody enters a match and they’ve chosen a certain character. That’s why we made the deliberate choice to not let you change your character. It’s a thing you commit to from the get-go, much like how you commit to score streaks. It’s a thing you chose in the lobby and you’re in it for the course of the match.

Lamia: One of the important things they didn’t get into, but that we will get into, is that you can personalize that. There will be ways you can make that your version of it.

Bunting: There are a couple of different skins for the specialists in there right now, just to get the system propped up, but we’re going to have a lot more. We’ll talk about that when we get to progression systems.

Above: Street battle in Call of Duty: Black Ops III

Image Credit: Activision

GamesBeat: This whole thing with customizing characters that each have their own abilities is common in games like League of Legends. Was this influenced by that?

Bunting: I can’t say it wasn’t.

Lamia: We’re gamers. Yeah.

Bunting: Our senior combat designer on the multiplayer team is a die-hard MOBA player. We’re all hardcore gamers. We all love games of every type. That influences and infuses us and excites us. We play these games and it excites us to think about our own game in different ways. We approach this with an original take on what Black Ops multiplayer can be. We wanted to still make it feel very Call of Duty, but we also went through that evolution of multiplayer at Treyarch. It’s something very clearly defined, with these big decisions you’ve made and committed to for the duration of a match.

Lamia: One of you mentioned going through the iteration of our abilities. On a systems level, it’s another way, as David was saying, on that powerband, create a class works. Pick 10 works. It’s something that people can easily understand. They understand the trade-offs associated with it. I don’t think there’s any issue associated with that. We wanted to introduce a bunch of new abilities without infringing on that system that works really well. We wanted to put new stuff in that system and give players new ways to do that.

Taking away the fiction part of it, that’s a great place to put that and then dial that and balance that in between score streaks. Let’s face it. Some people are really great at getting those. And create a class, which is moment to moment — it was a really nice place to be able to introduce something anybody could get that makes you feel powerful, makes you feel cool. The team has always had a strong desire to introduce more fiction into the multiplayer game. This is a great way to do that.

Bunting: Every single project, we’ve tried to get some kind of character archetype into the multiplayer game. Before there was pick 10 in Black Ops II, we were going down the path of starting the new character archetypes, which we’ve dabbled in every single game before that. This time, having the three-year cycle meant we actually had the time to flesh that out.

The problem we always ran into is that create a class is such an open and player-driven customization system. We didn’t want to wreck that. That’s a core staple of Call of Duty now. We struggled in the early days with different types of abilities. We kept pulling things out of one system into another system. Ultimately we started solidifying and saying, “Create a class is off limits. Don’t take anything out of there. This is its own thing. We have to come up with unique gameplay ideas that sit outside of this and can fit within a character archetype.”