GamesBeat: I suppose you could beef up your armor if you’re also more vulnerable.

Lamia: I’m not going into that yet. I can’t go into multiplayer.

GamesBeat: But the one I thing I wonder how you handle is the 1980s weapons going against 2025 weapons.

Lamia: The multiplayer takes place exclusively in the year 2025.

GamesBeat: Okay.

Lamia: Without getting into weapons…that’s not to say that certain weapons could be around for a while. There are weapons right now that have been around for a while. You never know.

GamesBeat: Or the RC car bomb. When did the RC car bomb appear?

Treyarch PR: You talk about balance — the responsibility of balance. You talk about the graphical updates. One thing that I’ve taken away from these meetings is talking about your team, bringing it from three separate teams to one team for Black Ops, and then you guys have been working together for a long time now. That’s one solid team now.

Lamia: Yeah. I mean, you just look at this wall here behind me [see picture at top of story]. I think it’s really important to note that when we made World at War, there were three teams here working on three different games: Quantum of Solace, World at War, and Spider-Man: Web of Shadows.

You wrote a very kind article. You enjoyed what we showed you with Black Ops. I remember you talking about our team when you wrote that article a couple of years ago, and you recognized what we were creating with Black Ops very early on.

While it was a team that was filled with Call of Duty veterans, as a team, that was a new team. That was a team that came together from multiple teams when we said, “We’re just gonna make Call of Duty here at Treyarch. We’re going to put all of our attention, energy, and focus into one place and we’re going to give it everything we’ve got.” That’s what Black Ops was.

When you put together multiple teams, it takes a little while for everything to be clicking and working, right? There are leads from multiple teams; there are people who are familiar with different tools even — maybe even different genres — and yet very talented. So it’s not surprising to me that you see this team, by the way, doing new things. Because there are influences coming from people who were working even in different genres.

We have a super-talented artist who’s been at Treyarch for a long time who I remember — on Spider-Man 3 — looking at the street textures in New York or the sides of the buildings. He would sit there and look at the sides of the buildings and analyze it. And I remember walking up to him when they were working on that Los Angeles — the destroyed Los Angeles landscape. He was looking at the destruction on the building, and I just looked at it, and I said, “My God, it’s deja vu.”

Anyway, it was three teams, and it took us the better part of that first year of Black Ops to get to the place where everyone could really get the most out of each other. It was really that second year where we hit our stride.

You’ve probably worked at different companies and things like that. You know that when there’s a leadership change or there’s a structure change, there’s a little bit of time where you’re all getting familiar — how to get the most out of each other and get the best out of each other. It’s very natural, especially in a creative space, for that. By that second year, we had that humming here. That’s why coming out of Black Ops, we put everything we had into Black Ops II.

Now, from this point, what can we do? If you look at it from that perspective, it’s probably not that surprising that the team wanted to do all these different things. They had such a great head of steam coming out of Black Ops.

GamesBeat: How many people worked on this one?

Lamia: There’s over 250 people at Treyarch, but there’s over 300 people working on the project. We do have contractors and test teams that aren’t part of the company. Those others aren’t actually employees of Treyarch. But there’s over 300 people working on the game right now.

But if you think about it, the campaign’s pretty big and ambitious. The multiplayer is pretty big and ambitious. And they really are creating another game with the Zombies there.

Check out our other coverage of Call of Duty: Black Ops II:

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