And what has Treyarch done for us?

[TriggerGod]

Sure, they made Call of Duty 2: Big Red One, Call of Duty 3, and Call of Duty: World at War, but what have they really done for the franchise?

 

Anyways, Treyarch is making a new Call of Duty game for us, titled Black Ops (with the obligatory Call of Duty in the front of it.)

 

According to the internet, Black Ops will be taking place in 'Nam, and you will be a black operative going behind enemy lines.

 

A teaser trailer on GT found here shows someone obviously being revived, with many fast cuts and takes between other stuff.

[Mav]

actually IIRC 'Nam is just a part of it, it's supposed to take you through the beginning/foundation of the special forces during the Cold War Era and leading up to modern times... I think.

[Sabretooth]

Sure, they made Call of Duty 2: Big Red One, Call of Duty 3, and Call of Duty: World at War, but what have they really done for the franchise?

 

There was an article about exactly this on Kotaku, to which a commenter made some excellent points.

 

We're going inside baseball here. This is going to be long.

 

Some innovations and other good ideas Treyarch has brought to the COD series:

 

1) Nazi zombie mode.

 

2) Extended mag attachments for guns. Used by IW.

 

3) Reduction of the broken "3x frag" perk down to "2x frag".

 

4) "Second Chance" revive mechanic.

 

5) Tossing back grenades. Used by IW.

 

6) Online website with in-depth stat tracking.

 

7) Scaling "assist exp" by how much damage you did.

 

8) Vs. Nemesi k/d ratio tracking.

 

9) Lobby leaderboards. Handy for finding out the guy on first prestige has played twice as long as the guy on 10th prestige.

 

10) Sticky grenades. Used by IW.

 

11) Additional custom classes for doing prestige. Used by IW.

 

12) Banking killstreaks. You don't lose one if you don't use it before earning the next one. Used by IW.

 

13) Prevented the cheap practice of chaining one killstreak from a previous life towards earning new killstreaks on the current life. (Cod4 had a major problem with people doing this with airstrikes). Used by IW.

 

14) Bootcamp playlist. Although proper matchmaking should make this redundant.

 

15) Local Only match preference option for matchmaking.

 

16) Free map DLC. (Makin' Day).

 

17) Deployable LMG stands in console versions.

 

18) Tracking performance in leaderboards by match type.

 

19) Scoring points for killing opponents killstreaks. (+3 exp for each dog killed). Which actually counted towards match score. I've won numerous TDM's by killing an opponents attack dog.

 

20) Option to turn off Aim Assist in online matches.

 

21) Semi-auto firerate limiter that only kicks in after noticing too many shots too quickly after some amount of time. Better than IW's solution of flatly lowering the firerate because it allows people with quick trigger fingers to enjoy their gift while still rendering modded controllers useless.

 

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Areas Treyarch needs to work on for their next game:

 

1) Swapping to a pistol should be faster than swapping to a non-pistol. That's the pistol key advantage.

 

2) More diversity between guns in the same category. The M1911, Nambu, Walther, and the Tokerev pistols were nearly identical to each other functionally. As were the Springfield, Arisaka, Kar, and Mosin Nagant snipers. As well as the rifles SVT and the Gewehr being almost the same except the skins.

 

3) Shorter killstreaks. Artiliary shellings lasted too long.

 

4) Better balancing. The MP40+Juggernaut combo was too powerful and never got fully fixed.

 

5) Mines that could be hidden too well without any giveaway sign and tripped too quickly making them horribly overpowered.

 

6) Guns unlocked at later levels shouldn't be categorically superior to guns unlocked earlier; which in many ways was the case with the M1A1 in regards to the SVT and the Gewehr by functioning nearly identically except for a larger magazine; and to some degree a problem with the PTRS sniper being superior in every category except the amount of additional rounds carried in your pocket.

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My memory isn't as good these days. Please correct me where I'm mistaken.

 

I have high hopes for Black Ops. I'll be checking for the beginning of pre-orders of a limited edition this time after missing out the last time around. It reallly was "limited".

 

For gamers, I don't think the Call of Duty franchise has been destroyed or the industry dented in any way. Treyarch can still put up a decent product. Infinity Ward may come up with something good too, though that's largely in the air. Respawn Entertainment looks great right now and they have a lot of creative freedom to come up with something. And all of this notwithstanding, there's the Battlefield series on one hand and EA's revival of Medal of Honor.

 

Assuming Respawn gives us the same quality of games, we have *four* different franchise now and they all should have the sort of creative freedom that Activision's game-a-year model didn't.

[JediAthos]

Given that Respawn already has a good portion of Infinity Ward's former staff I'd be disappointed if whatever they choose to develop is anything but quality.

 

Apparently I'm in the minority but I always like IW's titles better than Treyarch even if Treyarch has made a lot of little improvements to the games. That's not to say that I won't play Black Ops either though.

[Mav]

Apparently I'm in the minority but I always like IW's titles better than Treyarch

No way brah, that's the majority, lurn2pewpewgaem.

[TriggerGod]

So I just watched IGNs E3 stream on Black Ops, and I must say, it looks fairly good, and I'm already seeing a lot of familiar features. The best part of the presentation was probably when you get in the Hind, and you go up river blowing **** up. There was also a little part in the beginning while your crawling through tunnels killing a Vietnamese person who killed the guy you follow, but it was mostly crawling, not a lot of action.

[JediAthos]

http://e3.g4tv.com/videos/46409/E3-2010-Microsoft-Press-Conference-Call-of-Duty-Black-Ops/