Call of Duty therapy: Treyarch designer tells us how to get better in Black Ops III multiplayer

GamesBeat: The specialists themselves, did that come from a feeling of making it more like popular esports games? Or is it just that people seem to like those kinds of characters in games these days?

Vonderhaar: There’s a lot of motivation for specialists. It wasn’t specifically esports. An argument could be made that specialists in a Call of Duty game are challenging to make work in an esports context. I’ve heard the analogies before. I’m not a spring chicken. I’ve heard, “Oh, it was inspired by MOBAs.” It wasn’t, not specifically.

Here’s the source of motivation for specialists. We had create-a-class and we had pick 10. We had score streaks, the higher-end rewards you get for doing well. Not everybody can — you and I are good examples. I’m not going to be getting a mothership any time soon. You’re probably not either. But what you can get is Battery’s war machine, or Spectre’s active camo.

We’ve made the argument that there’s room for spiking the power band of a player in between the traditional loadout system and the score streak system. There was room in the middle of the combat loop to let everybody have a brief moment to pull out their ability, pull out their weapon, and wreak some havoc. They spike their power for a very brief time. It still puts you at risk, because if you die using your power then you lose it. But everyone can earn it and use it anywhere from two to three times depending on the game mode and rank and all those things. Everyone gets a moment to feel like a character, like the badass Black Ops character they are.

That was the design goal motivation. There was also, of course, the fictional goal. There were the story goals. Dan and I both felt pretty passionately that we could put some fiction in the multiplayer and wrap it in a more interesting way than just a straight “go get your 20 kills” approach. We could put some of that kind of gaming back into multiplayer. Black Ops II was a fantastic competitive shooter, but there wasn’t much fiction in the multiplayer. You had the faction announcers and that was about it.

It was fun for us. Dan and I like characters. We like to develop characters. The specialists are a good way to scratch that itch, but still keeps it in the Call of Duty competitive style of world.

GamesBeat: Have you tweaked things like the score streaks much? Not that I ever get to use them, but I’m curious about the highest levels, like the HATR.

Vonderhaar: The HATR can be shot down now. Before it couldn’t be. There are some new ones and some changed. Comparing the philosophy of Black Ops II to Black Ops III –this is very macro, of course. It depends on the score streak. But you’ll notice that the cost is higher. You have to earn into them at a much higher rate.

Every one can be defended against. That was a philosophical approach. The HATR versus the VSAT — the VSAT, there was nothing you could do to counter it. We pushed hard, on Black Ops II, to be sure that perks could be countered. In Black Ops III we extended that philosophy to score streaks. They all have a counter. You can’t just get EMP’d. Some of them can run down the Power Core and take it out. You can’t just pull the VSAT out. It takes effort, concentrated effort, but you can destroy the HATR. All of these things were built so you had some way to fight back. You can’t just get rolled. Granted, the mothership isn’t easy to take out of the sky. It’s actually quite difficult to take it out. It’s the highest-end score streak. But you can fight back.

If anything you could say they’re a little bit hard to earn, because that’s a fact. You could also say that they’re a little bit easier to fight back against. Both of those decisions were not made in a vacuum. They were conscious design decisions. I get that some of the guys who can drop 30 in a game are quite upset that you can shoot down the HATR, but it’s best for the game overall that there’s a counter.

With this much stuff in the game – this many score streaks, specialists, weapons, and abilities, plus all the perks and create-a-class content and equipment and wild cards — there’s a lot going on. Finding good strategies to counter other good strategies is part of the fun in the meta of a Black Ops game.

GamesBeat: Back to some beginner stuff, with the verticality in the levels, do you have some suggestions about how much jumping or wall-running we should be doing, trying to stay above everyone else?

Vonderhaar: Should you be jumping? Only if you want to get yourself killed. Combat movement is built to get you into position. Depending on your experience with this game and previous games in the series, this is a very analog system. It’s built to remove barricades and obstacles between players and where they want to go on the map, to not weight them down in getting to those positions. But you get exposed. It’s dangerous to be up on a wall-run, depending on when you choose to do it.

This is something to aid your ability to put yourself in a better position to flank or move into cover so you can jump down on somebody. If you try to use it to gunfight, you’re probably going to find yourself staring at the kill cam a lot. Do not use core movement if you’re not ready for it. Don’t think you need to wall-run everywhere. That’s not what it’s for. It’s for pacing and flanking and getting into position or getting out of trouble. It’s not for fighting.

GamesBeat: I was looking around for stats. Are you guys not sharing as much as you have before? I couldn’t very easily find global stats for things like bullets fired so far and stuff like that.

Vonderhaar: Do you play on PlayStation or Xbox?

GamesBeat: I’m on PS4.

Vonderhaar: To try to help with that situation — on the PS4 the button says “Options” and in the game it says “Menu.” If you press the Options button you’ll bring up the menu, and inside the menu you’ll find all that detail, including the Barracks. It’s nested. You can drill down pretty extensively on all of your stats, both public and the competitive arena stats. Kills, wins, win-loss ratio, kills per minute, K/D ratios. You can drill down on your game modes. I have the most wins in Domination, with a 1.33 win-loss ratio.

It’s a very visual presentation. It’s in a grid. They’re called tiles. You can find your deadliest weapon, most effective weapon, most effective score streak. By pushing down into those things, you can see your assists, assists per use. Everything’s there. The difference is about usability. I don’t think looking at a list of numbers is very fun. We tried to visualize the data in a way that’s more interesting than just having lots of lists of stats.

GamesBeat: I liked some of the visualization you could do with Call of Duty Elite. Are you think about some of that down the road, having more practical visualizations for people?

Vonderhaar: I don’t have any information to give out about that kind of thing at this time.

GamesBeat: We’ve seen a couple of updates on the PS4. Has that changed anything important so far?

Vonderhaar: If you go on Black Ops III, there was a big update right before launch. We always do that. There’s no stopping work here. It’s always going on. More important, since launch, we’ve done hot fixes at a rate of about one a day. Every one of those makes three or four significant improvements to the game. Those could be anything from feature improvements to bug fixes.

We can’t fix everything with a hot fix. Some things take an update. Anything in code takes an update — what’s called a patch or a title update, depending on the platform. All of those hot fixes will get rolled into patches and we’ll release the patch notes, where we more specifically detail everything that’s been changed or updated or improved or fixed or added as a feature. But many people in this building right now, including myself, are working on hot fixes daily. It’s a little burdensome to detail. If you look at my Twitter you can get a good snapshot of the things we’ve been changing.

A lot of it’s small stuff, to be honest. The challenge isn’t working correctly, or this gun is a little overpowered. A lot of nuance-ey stuff that I don’t think two million people care about. Maybe 500,000 people care about it, the real hardcore. But I don’t want to weigh people down with detail. I want them to play and enjoy the game. We’re working on it every day.

GamesBeat: What would be your own definition of success for multiplayer? How do you try to measure that from a high level?

Vonderhaar: I sent out an email to the team a few days ago — to the whole studio, really. I said, “You’ll see a lot of numbers. You’ll see sales numbers, review scores. But the number I care about is engagement.” I define the success of the game by how many people play it. Not even how many people buy it, which is obviously a lot. I care that they love it and play it and want to play it all the time. Engagement is my metric for success, and not just for multiplayer, but for Zombies and campaign and co-op as well.

If people are playing all the time — if we’re making the right decisions about gameplay and making the content we need to keep them engaged and fixing the things that need to get fixed — that’s my definition of success. No question. It’s engagement.

GamesBeat: What have you heard from pro gamers so far? Are they noticing anything or particularly liking anything that you can tell?

Vonderhaar: We have an interesting dialogue going on right now. I expected that pro gamers would want to play Uplink, but they’re telling me that they’re pretty interested in CTF. That’s the hot one as of 24 hours ago. We’re also talking about how many votes you should get in the ban system, and whether anything has to be restricted. It’s a healthy dialogue. I try to keep it off the main channels, talking about that on their terms and for their level.

I’ve made four or five adjustments to Arena Pro Series, trying to dial that in for what they’re gravitating toward. We’re going to see a pretty exciting and robust esports year with Black Ops III, given the feature set and how we’re approaching the game as far as esports.

GamesBeat: If people go to watch other players on sites like Twitch, trying to learn and get better, what are some things they might be looking for? Watching someone who’s really good, what should you try to take away from that?

Vonderhaar: Find the right streamer for you. There are lots of streamers, a lot of very talented people. Some people like to watch very good players. They want to watch someone go and drop what we call a “30 or better bomb,” just demolishing the opposition. Some people like to watch pro players specifically, because they’re competitive and they want to understand some of those advanced tactics.

I have to give you a pretty general answer, because you and I need to watch a different type of streamer. We need to watch the tutorial streamers, the guys who focus on what we call challenges. This is pretty fun. I’m not talking about the game challenges. These guys say, “Okay, I’m not very good with the KUDA. I’m going to equip the KUDA and run the KUDA and we’re going to learn how to use this gun.”

Those aren’t the most popular streamers. The big pro players are popular. The big YouTubers are popular. These are mid-tier streamers in terms of viewership, but I love these guys. I love the whole category of people. You can find them on Twitch and other platforms. It’s fun to see how they approach the learning curve and the challenge. The viewers will say, “I want you to play with this gun that you’re not normally good at.” It’s an interesting phenomenon. The viewers give these players challenges to try and they’ll show how to get good with particular things, whether it’s a piece of equipment or a weapon or a score streak or a specialist. I find those things fascinating.

If you’re trying to learn and get better, watching a pro player is actually not going to help you. Those guys are so far advanced — we need to work on steps one, two, and three before we start talking about step 50. Same thing with the big streamers. The big streamers are there to entertain people, and learning isn’t always entertainment. I like the challenge streamers, personally.