Their goal is about main quests and sub-quests and sub-sub-quests and hidden things. We’ve gone deeper with that than ever before in terms of visual clues, audio cues, dialogue lines, physical things. Their whole goal is to put together the story and understand all the complexities of the story. Their goal, quite simply, is to get as high a round as possible on a map and say, “This is what I did.” Even those guys actually subdivide into, “Did you do it with perks?” and so forth. The Zombies community is actually quite complex in terms of the different groups who identify and say, “This is what we do.” For instance, there’s the high round community. GamesBeat: The variety between the three different Zombies experiences, what is each one supposed to convey? It seemed like you guys had a pretty good idea that IX was more accessible or approachable, so we should start there and then end up with Voyage.īlundell: Each one has a different set of properties that appeal to different people. I just had this game in multiplayer.” That’s how we approached it. It’ll be more like, “Today I did this in Zombies. They’re about being there with your friends and the stories you can tell based on the things that we’re putting in the tool box. And then you have Blackout, which is a slower initial bit, and then the intensity ramps up as the circle comes closer and the conflict is pushed on you.īased on what mood you’re in, what tempo you’re after, what kind of action gameplay, there’s a mode for you, but all the modes are geared around social interaction. Then you have Zombies, which is more of a medium tempo that spikes at key points. You have multiplayer, which is just snap snap snap, a very fast tempo. I like to look at it from an adrenaline point of view. GamesBeat: With the three experiences in one, where did that come from?īlundell: You can look at it from a lot of different angles. All these things come together to give us the experience for Black Ops IV. And then the most customizable, we have custom mutations. Even meta-systems, which we’re going to be rolling in regardless of whether you have Black Ops Pass or not - we’re changing our mentality of how we’re approaching it to give you more ability to unlock skins and calling cards and all this other fun stuff. When I say the most personalized, the idea that you can customize your character, choose your loadouts and equipment.
Taking Zombies as an example, when I say it’s the most social, obviously the number of maps, the number of stories, the amount of emergent behavior that can come from those different scenarios. All the decisions around all the aspects of the game were guided by that goal.
GamesBeat: How would you say you approached this Zombies at the outset?īlundell: This time, it really stemmed from the mentality of the whole project, which is one of the most socially connected, most customizable and deep games - now, it sounds like a tagline, but that’s the place we started from. GamesBeat: Is it three years you’ve been working on this?īlundell: I’ve worked at Treyarch for 15 years, and this is a three-year project. Jason Blundell: I’m director of Zombies, and for my sins I’m executive producer as well. GamesBeat: What was your position on Zombies this time out?