At E3 2010, Call of Duty: Black Ops was not playable, but I was shown a demo of two separate levels. The first level currently called “WMD” begins with you in control of an SR-71 Blackbird that as this point is just for reconnaissance, so after you take off, you are really just looking at a radar screen spotting enemies for the team below you. An SR-71 can fly up 80,000 feet above ground, so in 1968 Soviet Union, your Blackbird is definitely out of site as you can see what may be the best approach for the team below to infiltrate the Russian base.
The level now cuts to you playing as one of the soldiers below waiting prone with a scoped cross-bow. You silently begin to take out enemies with your crossbow as you move closer to the Russian Sub Base. A squad members lets you know that you have the option of using switching to explosives if you catch ‘heat’, which is a timed explosive on your arrow that is set to go off shortly after impact. This would obviously blow your cover and was deliberately shown to us to our delight. The much publicized highlight was when you eventually make it to the sub station and rappel down and into the windows of the base to take it over using the element of surprise.
To open a door at one point, you must shoot the hinges off of it to get through. After taking control of a communications station you eventually need to escape. Running down a snowy hill only to find that an avalanche is occurring, you have no choose other than to jump off the cliff. As you fall down to what seems like and endless snowy abyss, the level ends. Pretty epic as expected with the brand of Call of Duty. Some of the weapons seen in this demo are the already mentioned cross-bow with alternative explosive arrows, the AK-47, the SPAS w/ incendiary shells and the silenced ACOG sighted AUG.
Payback was the name of the next level we were shown where you begin underground in a tunnel in 1968 Vietnam. You emerge to find your team mate deciding the next move is to take control of an enemy helicopter. As you move toward it you are armed with a Colt Commando assault rifle which is very reminiscent of today’s M4 in the world of Call of Duty, even equipped with a grenade launcher A.K.A. the noob tube. Once in control of the HIND, you are fully in control with no rail system. You control the weapons and the flight controls. When I asked what the controls were for the chopper, I was told that it was very easy to maneuver as well as use the weaponry on it. I can talk all day about this second level shown to us but instead you can watch a similar demo below which was seen at the Microsoft Press Conference that I missed because of my delayed flight.
If you would like to catch some of the first demo we saw, you can check out a version of it here. It is not the entire thing but we were asked not to film inside the screening room.
Josh Olin was nice enough to answer a couple of questions for me after the preview of the demo in the dark depths of the screening room. I am very tired here if you can’t tell and really was just dying to get some info on the inevitable co-op mode that they will have in Black Ops. Treyarch’s last game had Nazi Zombies and now they have to top that with a new 4 player co-op mode which he did confirm, I just couldn’t get him to talk about it. He does mention that multiplayer might have been re-vamped to make it easier to have social/clan matches though. When the phrase ‘Create a Class 2.0’ was spoken it, sounded like more attachments to me but if it was to top Modern Warfare 2’s attachment list, it would have to be quite a large one which leads me to believe that maybe you can actually customize your character in this one. Either way Josh definitely makes it seem like they are taking the Black Ops theme straight to multiplayer.
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