Treyarch’s Call of Duty: Black Ops 3 will feature a narrative that’s fairly twisted. If you’ve ever had to deal with the Numbers in the first game or the various consequences of Black Ops 2, this won’t be much of a surprise to you. However, as studio design director David Vonderhaar told GameSpot, “A lot of the mystery of the latest trailer and all the story stuff is there because there is some really screwed up mind-f***ery going to happen to you when you play the game. That’s the Black Ops narrative, that’s intentional in design.”
This is all intentional of course and Vonderhaar provided some more context on what drives your character and squad in the beginning. “We’re doing that on purpose because that’s the Black Ops way, right? This is covert ops. This is, ‘I’m not sure what’s going on with me right now, I’m not who I think I am. Are all these things normal?’ This is an important part of storytelling, and I will not give it away.
“But it’s not hard to understand the story. You’re a Black Ops operative. Your counterparts have gone off the grid in a world where you’re connected and wired all the time. There’s a huge leak of military intelligence and you’re sent in to investigate that. So we set it up that way and we send you up and along the way, we untangle a huge weavy story; a very deep, very dark, and sometimes really twisted narrative experience.”
As for designing the weapons, there was emphasis on depicting how the weapons in the Black Ops timeline would evolve versus how their real-word counterparts would be in the future.
“As a first-person shooter, you’re obviously focused on weapon design. The weapons team will basically plot how weapons have evolved over time, and they’ll project beyond where we are. They’ll turn themselves into futurists so that they put the weapons where they would be in 2065 in our timeline, which is a very distinct timeline. Someone else’s 2065 might be very different than the Treyarch Black Ops 2065.
“Plausible, feasible, and grounded in reality are actually our mantras, they’re really important parts of what we do. We take some liberties where we think it makes sense for the story and the narrative, as you might expect. Obviously, the DNI and neural interface stuff. All the augmentation in the game, and that whole theme, is not unrealistic. It’s actually quite plausible. You can see the roots of that stuff right now.”
Call of Duty: Black Ops 3 is out on November 6th for Xbox One, Xbox 360, PS3, PS4 and PC. For all the nice new additions, it’s a shame that the campaign won’t be available for previous gen owners.