We recently had a chance to speak to Eric Biessman, Creative Director for Raven Software, which is working on the multiplayer for the upcoming Call of Duty: Ghosts. Given the repetitiveness that has begun to plague the series, we asked Biessman on the key features of Ghosts that the development team is most excited about and which will ensure the enthrallment of gamers worldwide.
“There are things I can cover in just broad points without going into too much detail. To begin with, the Infinity Ward designers said that, they know Black Ops 2’s customization was something people really got into. So, right when you jump into the game, you’re going to see the multiplayer side. The way we want you to play is to commit to your character. So right away we see the visual side of things. You can customize heads, arms, legs. There’re something like 20,000 different combinations based on the different pieces. And that’s purely visual, including the female characters. We know there’s plenty of female fans and we want to give them the opportunity to have this connection to their character like everyone else. So from a purely visual side, there’s that.
“From the game side, we also have the Pick 10 system. The designers at Infinity Ward wanted to expand that. So, the idea of this is that there’s groups of perks, and they’re for speed and stealth and handling and awareness and resistance and equipment and Within these groups are specific perks. Each perk has a different cost, and you can choose how those work. So you can have a five point perk and a couple one point perks. For example, Dead Eye- every time you get a kill, it increases the damage of your next attack. So you maybe give up things that you are more used to maybe use this perk. So the idea is, if you want a gun, you can get it, but if you want to be stealthy, you get the stealthy perks and stuff like that. That’s one of the things that I think is pretty deep and good for gameplay.
“Then additionally, there’s the idea of having the player connecting with the character, and how you connect with the world. Just from the weapons side, there’re 30 new weapons. You can also slide into cover, you can prone move and slide at the same time. With Call of Duty, it tends to be very much about learning a map, and learning about how you play on that map. And that’s something we didn’t want to disrupt. I think that’s part of the fun- the fast motion, feeling like you can own the world. And so we didn’t want to make just everything destructible. It’s like, you can blow open specific areas to create an overwatch for a sniper, or you can destroy a gas station, and create cover.
On being asked if that meant some limited destruction overall, Biessman replied, “Yeah, we don’t want it to be everywhere. We want it to be in specific spots, so you can still learn the map. You know, ‘oh, that’s down, there might be someone here.’ Or, you know, ‘this is open, I need to watch my flank from the sniper’ or whatever.
“And I think player choice is the important part. It’s mostly about, tactically, there’s something you want to use. So, that’s a lot of talking right there. [laughs]”
Does that make you excited for the multiplayer mode, especially considering the new modes that will be included, or are you sick of Call of Duty’s multiplayer at this point? Call of Duty: Ghosts releases on November 5th for Xbox 360, Wii U, PC and PS3, with a PS4 release on November 15th in North America and November 29th in Europe and an Xbox One release on November 22nd.