Treyarch Used Modern Warfare 2 as Benchmark for Black Ops

[Logan Westbrook]

Treyarch Used Modern Warfare 2 as Benchmark for Black Ops

The studio is under a lot of pressure, but it apparently all comes from within.

Treyarch's game design director David Vonderhaar says that the studio wasn't intimidated by the record-breaking launch of Infinity Ward's Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 [http://www.amazon.com/Call-Duty-Modern-Warfare-Xbox-360/dp/B00269QLI8/ref=sr_1_1?s=videogames&ie=UTF8&qid=1297120140&sr=1-1] when it was making the follow-up. Instead, it was a source of inspiration, and a benchmark for what Treyarch wanted to achieve with Call of Duty: Black Ops [http://www.amazon.com/Call-Duty-Black-Ops-Xbox-360/dp/B003JVKHEQ/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1297120073&sr=8-1].

However, Vonderhaar felt that stressing out over exact numbers wasn't the most productive use of his or Treyarch's time. He said that it was impractical for Treyarch to make content with the mindset of selling a certain number of copies. All Treyarch could do, he explained, was try to make content that people wanted to buy and accept that anything else was out of its control. Vonderhaar said that Treyarch was under a lot of pressure to perform, but that most of it came from within the studio. He said that the team was constantly trying to one-up itself, not because of corporate influence, but out of a desire to grow and improve.



What Vonderhaar describes seems like the only way to approach the mammoth task of making a Call of Duty game and not go crazy. It seems to have worked too, as the launch of Black Ops was even bigger than Modern Warfare 2. Of course, how much of that is actually down to Treyarch's hard work, and how is down to the power of the Call of Duty brand, is a point that you could debate for days.

Source: MCV [http://www.mcvuk.com/features/854/INTERVIEW-David-Vonderhaar]


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[Tdc2182]

They did good enough.

I especially liked how they actually analyzed "what not to do" from Modern Warfare 2's mistakes.

Then again, this is all about the Multiplayer. The single player left a somewhat bad taste in my mouth.

 

[fix-the-spade]

I especially liked how they actually analyzed "what not to do" from Modern Warfare 2's mistakes.

Treyarch's big list of stuff to not do.

#1: disagree with Bobby
#2: get fired

 

[Tdc2182]

I especially liked how they actually analyzed "what not to do" from Modern Warfare 2's mistakes.

Treyarch's big list of stuff to not do.

#1: disagree with Bobby
#2: get fired

Yeah.

That too.

 

[CarlsonAndPeeters]

I really liked Black Ops because I enjoy shooty deathmatch fun online. But it is honest-to-god the safest game I have ever played. Not that thats an entirely bad thing--like I said, its fun--but they'll never advance the series the way Infinity Ward did with CoD 4 unless they take some risks and stop worrying about matching the last game's sales.

 

[Daemascus]

I really liked Black Ops because I enjoy shooty deathmatch fun online. But it is honest-to-god the safest game I have ever played. Not that thats an entirely bad thing--like I said, its fun--but they'll never advance the series the way Infinity Ward did with CoD 4 unless they take some risks and stop worrying about matching the last game's sales.

Just saying, they like making money as much as we do. It always has been and always will be about money.

 

[captaincabbage]

Are you sure they didn't use Modern warfare as a diving board instead?

 

[googleback]

I tend not to like Call of duty MP but I think COD4 has one of the best FPS single player campaigns ever, since then I've just rented them because I know that multiplayer is the reason its so expensive and I know i'll never play the game again... I have to say Black ops was a HUGE misstep for the franchise in terms of singleplayer, the multi however (apart from zombies which is great) I cant really comment on.

 

[zxBARRICADExz]

heh.. 3arch took 3 steps backwards when it comes to BO.

 

[phoenix352]

a benchmark would be a bad word for them to use in my case as black ops is very badly optimized while having the same if not worse graphics so i ended up playing a very laggy game and medium - max settings while i can play MW2 on max without a problem...

and i cant complain about the games performance in the game play department as its the CoD formula ... never changes ... they added some tiny feature like customizations but thats all i saw new here.

 

[RandomMab]

It also probably helps that Black Ops' marketing budget was exponentially larger than Modern Warfare 2's.

 

[Artemicion]

I heard Black Ops isn't performing as well as Modern Warfare 2 did during the months after release.

Not that I've any professional knowledge on the subject, I'm still playing Left 4 Dead and Castle Crashers.

 

[Irridium]

I just wish they gave the guns some decent sounds.

Seriously, the guns sound so damn weak. It sounds like I'm firing from an angry stapler.

 

[Natdaprat]

They like to tell themselves this. The brand of Call of Duty is much bigger than the developer itself, close to what Grand Theft Auto is to Rockstar; but they make up for it by making some different and epic games like Red Dead Redemption and La Noire. Most players won't even know it's a different company that made the latest Call of Duty, they just see the brand.

 

[Paragon Fury]

Here is a question then; if the IW games are the benchmark, how come every single TA game looks markedly worse than the preceding IW game, even though they have similar content and technology.

 

[captaincabbage]

Are you sure they didn't use Modern warfare as a diving board instead?

This is what happened, and it illustrates best what they did.

Not that BO (body odor?) is a bad game, but something about it just didn't feel as good as MW2. The whole game felt like it was tripping over its own two feet, constantly stopping to show me something or do something. It got to the point where all I wanted to do was shoot, not have the game take most of the control away from me AGAIN and tell me to plant bombs or knock over barrels.

Multiplayer? Same as MW2.

Yeah I kinda figured that out on my own, thanks. ;P

You're right tho, there was something about BlOps that just didn't work. It had a great setting, great guns, alright story and a great game engine, but it just kinda fell apart.

I can't stand the multiplayer either tho. There's just so many things wrong with ut. Don't bother reading if you don't really care, I'm just venting.

Spoiler

I'd also go as far to say that the multiplayer is inferior. Whilst there are many advancements to the multiplayer (many more than singleplayer), like CoD points (which also seem to be the BEST THING EVAR), there were so many places where it just fell short.
The maps weren't as interesting, save for Havana or Nuketown, and I never ended up playing any other maps because I just didn't like them.
Whilst it is excellent having CoD points and they make the game much more interesting, as well as fan and addictive, there feels like theres no real point once you've bought the guns you want and got the classes you like all sorted out, which took me all of one afternoon of my first try at online multiplayer.
The biggest let down is easily in the splitscreen department. It's more of a disappointment than anything else, considering all the cool things they did include for splitscreen.
For example, online splitscreen is possibly the greatest thing to happen to CoD, but the fact that you can't choose another profile to play as, or that you can't make a custom profile like you could for splitscreen games on MW2 just irks me and takes away all the possible fun you could have had levelling up with your friends.
Which brings me to my point on profiles. In MW2 you could have four players playing splitscreen together with their own profiles on the same game, so we all had our own persistant characters to level up and earn new guns for. Now with BlOps, they've done away with that completely, leaving us with more of an experience where player 1 plays whilst player 2 just kinda tags along, copying the killstreaks, classes and level stat of player 1.
It ruins the whole point of playing splitscreen in CoD.

On top of this mediocre game, the developers have the balls to market five maps to us at the price of $20AUD!
It all adds up to just one big fat disappointing game that's a lot worse than it could have been. It especially irks me since me and my friends are all big CoD fans who always loved getting together for a night of food, drink and playing CoD splitscreen, which was always awesome.