Black Ops 2 Preview and Changes:

[Korten12]

From Dtoid: http://www.destructoid.com/black-ops-ii-reinvents-the-multiplayer-experience-232613.phtml

Bits and pieces

The Create-a-Class system up to this point has followed a pretty simple formula. You've always had to pick at least one primary, secondary, attachment, lethal, and tactical, and multiple Perks and Streaks to craft your custom character. Well, forget this system completely, as you now have total freedom over what you want to bring in.

The new system is referred to as "Pick 10," and it's exactly what it sounds like. Players are now allocated ten points and have the choice of taking any ten pieces of content they want, each of which takes up an allocation point. For example, you don't have to bring in a secondary gun and can instead use its allocation point on something like an extra attachment for your primary or an extra lethal grenade.

Perks have also been completely redefined. For starters, Perks only impact the player's traits now, and don't give any enhancements to the weapons -- those have been relegated to the attachments. Pro Perks have been completely killed as well, so now the system is simply a matter of what you get from the start.

Most important of all, Perks aren't "absolutes" anymore, as game design director David Vonderhaar referred to them. The example David gave was the Ghost perk, which in past games would completely hide a player from UAV detection. In Black Ops II, Ghost will hide a player from UAV detection only while they're on the move.

The Pick 10 system has all your traditional weapon slots for creating your class, but it also adds three new slots called Wild Cards. This feature lets you "break the rules" of the traditional system by allowing you to stack your character like crazy.

There were six Wild Cards that Treyarch showed off, with choices like being able to take a third attachment, an extra lethal, two primary weapons, an additional attachment to add to your secondary, or an extra Perk 1, Perk 2, or Perk 3. Each Wild Card will of course use up one of your allocation points, as will whatever extra ability you take from the Wild Card menu.

Black Ops II simplifies the customization presentation by putting everything right in your face. Before, you'd have to move about multiple sub-menus, which made the process of customizing cumbersome. Now when you select something like the Assault weapons category, a visual carousel comes up that lets you scroll left or right so you can see all of your options.

Not feeling an Assault gun? Then simply press up or down to navigate to the shotguns, machine guns, pistols, rockets, and so forth. It's now very easy and, more importantly, fast to jump to all of the different sections when you want to equip your character.

The old Killstreak system has been kicked to the curb in favor of the new and improved Score Streak. Everything you do nets a certain point value now, which goes towards filling up your Score Streak meter located on the bottom right of your HUD. Reaching a certain point threshold will then unlock one of your three Streak rewards.

David gave a great example where a player grabs a flag (100 points), kills a guy (200 points for a flag kill), and then scores the flag (150 points). With the 450 points accumulated, the player is able to unlock two of his low-level Streak rewards, one that cost 375 points and the other 400 points. That's right, rewards aren't mutually exclusive.

This system is able to better reward offensive and defensive players. One prime example of the defensive reward is with the UAV, as the player who calls it in now earns 25 points for every kill their teammates are able to get thanks to the spot assist. So much for just ignoring the UAVs, eh?

Black Ops II does not have CoD Points. Instead, you earn an unlock token every time you level up, which can be used on weapons, Perks, equipment, Wild Cards, Score Streaks -- everything, basically. However, while you get to chose what you want to unlock, not everything will be on the table right away.

Content will revealed to you in small bursts every time you accomplish a major rank change, such as going from Lieutenant to Captain. This way, players won't be totally overwhelmed by all the options. Plus, this gives players something to look forward to through their multiplayer career.

"This is a lesson from Black Ops I," David told us. "Something that CoD Points, in my opinion, suffered from. Whereas CoD Points were really awesome, I could just buy everything I wanted by level 33, and I'd start to tap out at that point cause I got what I want."

-----------------------------------

While the gameplay itself probably won't be changed much, it's good to see that Treyarch is changing up things in Multi.

Thoughts?

 

[SillyBear]

At the moment I like the sound of the Pick 10 concept, but I'm worried it may unbalance the game. In Black Ops, making everyone pick 1 thing out of a small bundle of selected elements ensured a certain level of balance. With that gone, players might discover an unusual combo that is incredibly over powered. But it's too early to tell. Who knows.

I like the sound of the "score streak" that will actually reward objective based behaviour. Nice touch.

The main thing I care about as a PC player is having proper dedicated servers. Treyarch are normally pretty spot on with this - but I'm worried Infinity Ward and MW3 might make them turn towards taking that away.

It's plain and simple: I won't buy black ops 2 if it has matchmaking.

All in all I'm fairly excited (assuming Black Ops 2 will deal with servers the same way Black Ops did).

But I'm still glued to CoD4. I don't think anything will top that for me.

 

[Sean Hollyman]

Interesting, I'm actually looking forward to Blops 2, I like they're doing it differently.

 

[Alternative]

Good to see that they are trying to change things up. who knows if it will work or not. but still its nice to know that treyarch are trying to break the formula.

 

[Shadowstar38]

Every time I hear something about this game it gets me more hyped.

This reworked system sounds like it will kill some of the problems I had with Black Ops, and most COD games for that matter.

The only thing that might bite them in the ass is how the wild cards pick 10's are implemented. I can see players figuring out some kind of invincible, rapetastic combination within a week of launch.

 

[Vanitas likes Bubbles]

I'm kinda conflicted now on whether to straight out buy Black Ops 2 or buy it used. I'm definitely getting it though one way or another due to zombies being the most fun I have had in coop.

 

[Sixties Spidey]

I'm stoked! Although the absence of CoD points ticks me off a bit, I'm happy that they're changing things for multiplayer to be more user-friendly and accessible. I wonder if no CoD points translate to "No Wager Matches".

 

[Adam Jensen_v1legacy]

Cautiously optimistic about this one. It's still a CoD game so I definitely won't pre-order it no matter what.

 

[hazabaza1]

Hope it has a survival mode in it. Been playing my brother's copy of MW3 recently, survival mode is actually really fun. Not so much a fan of zombies though.

 

[SillyBear]

Hope it has a survival mode in it. Been playing my brother's copy of MW3 recently, survival mode is actually really fun. Not so much a fan of zombies though.

It won't have survival mode, 99% sure of that.

 

[Russirishican]

I'm stoked! Although the absence of CoD points ticks me off a bit, I'm happy that they're changing things for multiplayer to be more user-friendly and accessible. I wonder if no CoD points translate to "No Wager Matches".

As if anyone played wager matches to win CoD points anyway, with the money you have left over after beating a prestige, you could usually unlock everything, CoD points were pretty useless overall, and was more of an unwelcome limitation.

The most disappointing thing about Black Ops 2 overall is the way people are responding to it. All of my friends say they either won't buy it, or will buy it when it goes down in price, which would have been the proper response to MW3, but this time Treyarc is actually taking some respectable leaps here, 8 player zombies, some ACTUAL multiplayer changes instead of what MW3 did, sandbox approach to singleplayer, and a futuristic setting. (Just a side note that I have to say because it makes me so mad, a lot of the people I know say that they also won't buy it because its set in the future, which pisses me off because its bullshit. They don't know anything about the game, any of the changes Treyarch is making, anything about zombies, don't even have a reason why a simple change of setting should make much of an appreciable difference besides more gadgets, just "Herp derp, its different so I don't want it, because I'm so closed minded and thick that a change from the same game getting re-released year after year [which they bought] might actually blow my mind." /endrant Now where was I?) Our response to this game, even if it isn't exactly what we want, should be to buy it or at least encourage it, because even if you are pretentious enough to hate it simply because its a shooter, you have to agree, the fact that Treyarch is making changes because they care about their fanbase is much MUCH better than them simply making the exact same game again simply because it'll sell. Granted, I would like to see changes be a little bit more drastic, maybe something like an integral part of multiplayer being tactical strategy instead of just run n' gun fun, perhaps a new shooter IP? I feel like a new IP that is loosely connected to the CoD universe might work out well, if they played it right. So overall, I doff my hat to Treyarch for stepping in the right direction.

 

[Korten12]

I'm kinda conflicted now on whether to straight out buy Black Ops 2 or buy it used. I'm definitely getting it though one way or another due to zombies being the most fun I have had in coop.

Well luckily Call of Duty has no online pass so in the end it doesn't matter.

 

[Blazing Steel]

D: I don't like those changes D:

Spoiler

I love me some CoD now and then, but sweet jesus that sounds like some bad ideas. 10 points? Yeah, sounds good but there's gonna be some OP class combinations, (more than MW3 and Blops). Killstreak system? Homefront and Medal Of Honour did that, and again it sounded cool, but in practice it just lead to people running the exact same killstreaks.

It's nice they're changing things up to keep people comming back, I'm just highly sceptical of this being the new fairer system they're hoping for.

 

[Captain Epic]

I'm stoked! Although the absence of CoD points ticks me off a bit, I'm happy that they're changing things for multiplayer to be more user-friendly and accessible. I wonder if no CoD points translate to "No Wager Matches".

As if anyone played wager matches to win CoD points anyway, with the money you have left over after beating a prestige, you could usually unlock everything, CoD points were pretty useless overall, and was more of an unwelcome limitation.

The most disappointing thing about Black Ops 2 overall is the way people are responding to it. All of my friends say they either won't buy it, or will buy it when it goes down in price, which would have been the proper response to MW3, but this time Treyarc is actually taking some respectable leaps here, 8 player zombies, some ACTUAL multiplayer changes instead of what MW3 did, sandbox approach to singleplayer, and a futuristic setting. (Just a side note that I have to say because it makes me so mad, a lot of the people I know say that they also won't buy it because its set in the future, which pisses me off because its bullshit. They don't know anything about the game, any of the changes Treyarch is making, anything about zombies, don't even have a reason why a simple change of setting should make much of an appreciable difference besides more gadgets, just "Herp derp, its different so I don't want it, because I'm so closed minded and thick that a change from the same game getting re-released year after year [which they bought] might actually blow my mind." /endrant Now where was I?) Our response to this game, even if it isn't exactly what we want, should be to buy it or at least encourage it, because even if you are pretentious enough to hate it simply because its a shooter, you have to agree, the fact that Treyarch is making changes because they care about their fanbase is much MUCH better than them simply making the exact same game again simply because it'll sell. Granted, I would like to see changes be a little bit more drastic, maybe something like an integral part of multiplayer being tactical strategy instead of just run n' gun fun, perhaps a new shooter IP? I feel like a new IP that is loosely connected to the CoD universe might work out well, if they played it right. So overall, I doff my hat to Treyarch for stepping in the right direction.

A part of me is kinda glad that the "true" cod fans won't be buying. The people I know who aren't buying because it's in the future are the same people who bitched about the death of quickscoping in Black ops. The community might be a little less shit this time around.

 

[ToastiestZombie]

It's call of duty, so it means they don't change anything at all! /sarcasm

All these changes sound pretty damn good. It seems they're really trying to balance and change the game, let's hope the community doesn't ruin everything. But really, I just want a Zombies trailer!

 

[PrimitiveJudge]

All I care about is the Zombies mode, I am sick of running through jungles.

 

[Sixties Spidey]

I'm stoked! Although the absence of CoD points ticks me off a bit, I'm happy that they're changing things for multiplayer to be more user-friendly and accessible. I wonder if no CoD points translate to "No Wager Matches".

As if anyone played wager matches to win CoD points anyway, with the money you have left over after beating a prestige, you could usually unlock everything, CoD points were pretty useless overall, and was more of an unwelcome limitation.

The most disappointing thing about Black Ops 2 overall is the way people are responding to it. All of my friends say they either won't buy it, or will buy it when it goes down in price, which would have been the proper response to MW3, but this time Treyarc is actually taking some respectable leaps here, 8 player zombies, some ACTUAL multiplayer changes instead of what MW3 did, sandbox approach to singleplayer, and a futuristic setting. (Just a side note that I have to say because it makes me so mad, a lot of the people I know say that they also won't buy it because its set in the future, which pisses me off because its bullshit. They don't know anything about the game, any of the changes Treyarch is making, anything about zombies, don't even have a reason why a simple change of setting should make much of an appreciable difference besides more gadgets, just "Herp derp, its different so I don't want it, because I'm so closed minded and thick that a change from the same game getting re-released year after year [which they bought] might actually blow my mind." /endrant Now where was I?) Our response to this game, even if it isn't exactly what we want, should be to buy it or at least encourage it, because even if you are pretentious enough to hate it simply because its a shooter, you have to agree, the fact that Treyarch is making changes because they care about their fanbase is much MUCH better than them simply making the exact same game again simply because it'll sell. Granted, I would like to see changes be a little bit more drastic, maybe something like an integral part of multiplayer being tactical strategy instead of just run n' gun fun, perhaps a new shooter IP? I feel like a new IP that is loosely connected to the CoD universe might work out well, if they played it right. So overall, I doff my hat to Treyarch for stepping in the right direction.

Even if it was incredibly easy to max out CoD points, I still love the idea of in-game currency to purchase weapons and perks. It created a balance that gave boosters less incentive to boost through the game or rely on one weapon or attachment. Even if there were issues with the way sniper rifles were handled or how certain weapons in the game were OP, this is one of the most balanced CoD games in the series. And I wouldn't worry too much about the way Blops 2 is being recieved right now. Pre-orders broke MW3's record, and Blops 1 sold a shit-ton more than MW2, so I'm sure the same will occur with Blops 2.

 

[Russirishican]

-snip-

I hadn't thought about that, if you're right thats quite an unexpected bonus.

 

[Cabisco]

Sounds like a lot of good changes and would appear to be moving in the right direction, I'm much more impressed with this than I was leading up to MW3, which I didn't end up buying (borrowed it recently and I hated it).

For me personally I realised when I played Cod games I wasn't actually enjoying them most of the time, I was in a state of constant annoyance, but if this game shapes up to how it sounds and I enjoy it if I borrow it I can see myself putting some money down, if only to play zombies

EDIT: IS THERE ACTUALLY GOING TO BE EIGHT PLAYER ZOMBIES?!?!?!