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From MP1st – New Black Ops 2 Multiplayer Details – Game Modes, Challenges, Player Card, Theater and Prestige

Call of Duty is seeing some major improvements and additions in Black Ops 2′s multiplayer – more that you might of initially expected.
We’ve already learned about some of the initial Black Ops 2 multiplayer features back in September, including Pick 10, scorestreaks and wildcards etc., but after having recently visited the Treyarch Studios down in Santa Monica LA, MP1st was fortunate enough to preview a slew of brand new multiplayer features and content that have yet to be revealed.
Though unable to attend the event in person, game design director David Vonderhaar put together an informative presentation detailing some the exciting new multiplayer goodness making its way to Black Ops 2 this November 13.

Game Modes

Multi-Team

At launch, three modes will be playable with up to three different teams within the regular assortment of playlists. These three teams can be made up of three to four players. Treyarch calls these “3×3′s” and “3X4′s.” Multi-team game modes include:

• Team Deathmatch
• Kill Confirmed
• Hardpoint

Party Games

Party Games essentially replaces Wager Matches from the original Black Ops. However, players will now be able to earn XP and rank up in the regular progression. Game types include:

• Gun Game
• Sticks and Stones (Yes, the crossbow and ballistic knife are returning.)
• One in the Chamber
• Sharpshooter

Combat Training

Combat Training is now integrated into the main game and will include three different modes at launch.

• Bootcamp – In Bootcamp, players can rank up from level 1 to level 10 while gaining full experience. This playlist is solely made up of the Team Deathmatch game mode and pits one team of humans and bots against another team of human and bots. This eases the level of expectation placed on someone who may be new to the game.
• Objective – Here, players can rank past level 10, but will not earn the full amount of XP. Once again, two teams made up of both humans and bots are pitted against each other in various objective-based game modes.
• Bot Stom – No XP is earned in Bot Storm. Quite simply, a team of humans is pitted agains a team of bots – great for practice, map knowledge, and nailing down the basics of Call of Duty.

Customization

All game modes are customizable in Black Ops 2. Bots can be added to almost all game modes if a team needs filling out, for example. Players will also have the power to restrict content like certain attachments, perks and equipment. Interestingly, players will also be able to redesign the Pick 10 system to either a Pick 3 to Pick 17 system and anything in between. This can make for some extremely skill-based matches when weapons, perks and equipment are limited to only three slots. A slew of competitive settings and options have also been thrown in, including how FFA, TDM and CTS are scored, the ability to turn off 3rd person spectating, the ability to disable the announcer and a whole lot more.

Challenges

Challenges reward players for almost anything and everything – ranging from simple tasks to more difficult feats. Completing challenges is ‘the’ way to unlock cosmetic content for your character which can be shared throughout all aspects of the multiplayer. These challenges, numbering in the thousands, also reward players with XP in order to level up even faster.
Every weapon in the game, including atypical weapons like launchers, knives and assault shields all have challenges for camoflage patterns. Once these base camos are unlocked for a weapon, a whole new set of challenges are unlocked to complete for special camos, including some interesting hidden ones.
These challenges also extend to optic reticles. There are a total of eight unique reticles for each optic that are all unique to that optic which can all help your aim and precision. Just for the lol’s, Treyarch has also thrown in a number of comical shapes, including a mustache, aka “The Steve,” as well as the “EOTech Zombie Stopper.”
In-game, these rewards show up as a neatly presented icon in the top center of the screen when earned and are reviewable in the after-action report.

Player Cards

Every Player Card in Black Ops 2 is made up of these elements: a background, a clan tag, a player’s matchmaking level and a player’s current League Play rank.
In the emblem editor, players will have up to 32 layers to work with. Objects can be flipped, moved, rotated, scaled and copied and pasted from one layer to another. The choice of colors has been improved and RGB color mixing can also be tweaked. The emblem editor now also supports transparency.
Should you choose not to create your own emblem, default emblems will also be provided. For those willing to get creative, more complex shapes will become available upon completing specific challenges. When it comes to backgrounds, over 150 are selectable, not all of which are simple rectangular shapes.

Theater

The theater mode in Black Ops 2 is back and has seen some major improvements while keeping all the same tools, including the dolly cam, from previous Call of Duty’s. The new Social Features allow players to bookmark gameplays so that they can be revisited, meaning it’s now much easier to go back and search for your favorite moments after a plentiful night of games. The Meta Data has been expanded to include score, captures and defends while the robust Community Filter can help sort videos to a player’s preference. Up and down-voting is now also included for both films and screenshots.
An extremely powerful new feature, the Highlight Reel, allows players to create a film with the simple touch of a button. Simply load a game in the theater, select ‘Hightlight Reel,’ and “bam,” the game instantly creates your very own montage of your most excellent moments. Settings can be customized, however, to expand or simplify the contents of your film. Further editing can be done once completed as well.
As previously mentioned, players can also CoDCast previously recorded games in order to either get some practice in, or create some nifty commentaries. Parties can now head into theater mode and watch videos together while having the ability to watch any player from a first-person perspective.
Treyarch has also doubled the amount of clips or segments that can be put together in one video – up to 20 in total. Additionally, clips can now be merged into each other, creating one big clip. The brand new Attach to Object feature, a brilliant addition, will let players produce some really fancy shots. By entering free-roam, objects that are selectable will turn green. When selected, the camera will simply follow that object as it moves throughout the gameplay. Objects can range from various scorestreaks all the way down to the rocket that is launched out of an RPG. This means you can now follow said rocket in slow-mo as it plows into your enemies face.

Prestige

What everyone’s been waiting for.
Treyarch is handling prestige very differently in Black Ops 2. Once again, assumptions are being challenged. No longer is Prestige a “restart” as it was in previous Call of Duty titles. This time around, weapon experience and earned attachments are are carried over, as are all challenges.
Black Ops 2 is meant to be played all the way to prestige 10. Upon prestige-ing, tokens are rewarded to the player which can then be used to unlock what ever item you want forever, including items that you have yet to reach the required level for. On top of these tokens, an additional reward can be selected. These rewards include:

• New create a class slot – Up to 5 extra slots.
• Stats Reset – This is a complete wipe of all stats and unlocks. This is essentially like buying the game new.
• Refund – This gives back all unlock tokens a player has spent so far that prestige level. This basically allows players to re-roll or re-spec their character.

Only at prestige 10 is absolutely everything unlocked for the player. It seems Treyarch really wants players to see it through to the end in Black Ops 2 in order to achieve 100% of the benefits.
Ambitious, indeed, is Call of Duty: Black Ops 2′s multiplayer, but that’s not even the half of it. There’s still Zombies. Treyarch is holding nothing back this year and is sure to prove that Call of Duty’s still got the magic. Stay tuned for more undead info, as well as our very own thoughts and impressions of the multiplayer gameplay.
Any of these new features in particular have you interested? Let us know in the comments below!

Black Ops 2: Facts & Rumor List

From charlieintel.com:

Last Updated on Feb 18th at 9:23 am EST* New updates in RED

Developer: Treyarch

Estimated or Expected Dates (per MW3′s marketing):

First Teaser Trailer:  May 22

First Full Trailer:  May 29

XP 2012 Annoucement:  Jun 26

CoD XP 2012:  Sep 1-2

Black Ops 2 Release Date:  Nov 6

What we know as a FACT:
-A Call of Duty Game (as of now it definitely looks like Black Ops 2) is coming Nov 2012.
-This game will bring “meaning full innovation” to the series
-With the launch of this game, “Call Of Duty Elite 2.0″ will also launch
 Developer Discussions:
-Treyarch looking into adjusting sniper rifles between quick & hard scoping.
-Treyarch has asked about what perks we like and do not like
-Treyarch’s David Vonderhaar on twitter keeps asking questions about what we want like about COD MP.

Call of Duty Elite: List of Fixes (Febuary 12, 2012)

From CODCommunity.com:


Yes Call of Duty Elite has flaw, yes it has bugs and glitches that need to be fixed, but fear not as the people at Beachhead Studio know more about their own product than you think.
While many of you are waiting for the Clan Operations to finally work properly, Beachhead Studio addressed the following issues which went live on February 12:
Career

• Adjusted the Custom Class wizard to better support localizations and the winter camo option.
• Fixed an issue that would sometimes prevent the YouTube linking dialogue from appearing in the Modern Warfare 3 vault.
• Addressed an issue with YouTube linking that prevented some users from properly linking their Vault to their personal YouTube account.
• Fixed a bug where the Treyarch player emblem was being incorrectly displayed on the site.
• Fixed a bug in Weapon Performance where weapons were not being filtered across tabs.
• Updated the way that statistics data in the Recent Matches section is parsed. This corrects an issue where kills earned during the final moments of a match were not properly displaying in Recent Matches.
• Updated support in Recent Matches for objective-based game modes, correcting an issue where an incorrect value for plants and defuses was displayed.
• Addressed an issue where a small number of users were erroneously receiving a message that they had no MW3 data present.
• Corrected a bug in the ELITE showcase where some users were not seeing all of the digital badges earned during an operation.

Connect

• Additional Clan Privacy Settings – Clan Leaders should now be able to hide the Clan Feed.
• Hiding the Clan Roster/Leaderboards using privacy settings will now display this information for Clan Members.
• Fixed Roster sorting on Clan Detail page.
• Improved support for Comments using IE8.
• Minor update to the layout of the Clan Overview page.

Improve

• Updated Improve to display additional map-specific information, such as average KDR/SPM and sorting for the maps based on these values.
• Added thumbnails and links to the ELITE TV weapon videos for all Modern Warfare 3 weapons.

Drop Zone – Magazine

• Numerous text fixes and adjustments to Drop Zone content.
• Several localization updates for Drop Zone to better support French and German-speaking users.

Miscellaneous

• Corrected a display issue with special characters when viewing the site in French or German.

MW3 sells 6.5M in biggest day-one opening ever

From charlieintel.com:

Activision has just announced that Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 sold 6.5 million units in the US and UK on its first day (first 24 hours). That’s the biggest day-one for any entertainment product ever in history. The previous records set by Modern Warfare 2 was $310 million and Black Ops was estimated to have made $360 million in its first day.
“We believe the launch of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 is the biggest entertainment launch of all time in any medium, and we achieved this record with sales from only two territories,” said Bobby Kotick, CEO, Activision Blizzard, Inc. “Other than Call of Duty, there has never been another entertainment franchise that has set opening day records three years in a row. Life-to-date sales for the Call of Duty franchise exceed worldwide theatrical box office for “Star Wars” and “Lord of the Rings,” two of the most successful entertainment franchises of all time.”
Eric Hirshberg, CEO, Activision Publishing added, “Call of Duty is more than a game. It’s become a major part of the pop cultural landscape. It is a game that core enthusiasts love, but that also consistently draws new people into the medium. It is the most intense, adrenaline pumping entertainment experience anywhere. I would like to thank our incredible teams at Infinity Ward and Sledgehammer Games for making a brilliant game. But most of all, I would like to thank our millions of passionate fans worldwide. We made this game for you.”
-SOURCE: Kotaku and Joystiq

MW3: Dedicated Servers for console, Spawn System, Knifing, and more.

From DW24/7:

We find out why it is nearly impossible for Call of Duty to support dedicated servers for console gaming, plus other MW3 info.
During Call of Duty XP I got the chance to sit down with Infinity Ward’s Executive Producer, Mark Rubin. He was a huge help in answering the community’s questions, and below are his transcribed answers. Please keep in mind that he was not able to answer some of the questions due to the fact that select Modern Warfare 3 information can’t be revealed until launch.
One of the major things we discussed was why dedicated servers have not yet made their way to consoles for the Call of Duty series. This question has been asked a million times, and it’s something you constantly hear the community talking about. The short answer is simple: It’s a big technical and expensive issue.
According to Rubin:

It’s easy for someone to say, ‘I want servers on console’. I don’t think everyone understands exactly what they are asking for. What that would mean, would be opening up data centers in every single city across the world because this is such a huge game of 30 million plus people. We have more than 33 million people playing Modern Warfare 2 all over the world and even more play Black Ops.

There is a statistic which states that one in every four households in the UK own a version of Modern Warfare 2. Similarly, one in eight households owns a copy of Black Ops in the United States and sales in this region broke 13.7 million copies at the beginning of March, 2011. Rubin provided even more detail about the situation which really put things in perspective.

So now we have to open up data centers in every city in the world, that has severs. And we are not talking five or six severs, and we aren’t even talking ten to twenty servers. We are talking about more severs than all of World of Warcraft in every little data station. Each one can only have three to four games on it at a time, at most. It just becomes this nightmare of trying to spend four billion dollars on trying to create a server structure.
If we were a small game, servers on console might be something more achievable. We might be able to do a west coast server, central server and east coast server and that might be fine. But for us, if we actually did that, if I put a server in each region and you are somewhere in between you are going to connect to that sever and have horrible latency. In our game latency is important and you should be matchmaking with people close to you. So the actual thing here is that our style on console works better than dedicated servers from a latency standpoint. We know this is true; we have tested it from a numbers standpoint. The reality is that people think that is what they want, but they don’t understand the actual challenges.

Obviously, if you live near one of these data centers you will have an amazing connection, but for a majority of people that would not be the case. With Call of Duty sales growing larger each year the developers focus a lot on improving the way matchmaking functions. Rubin confirmed that search preferences, such as local matchmaking, would be returning to Modern Warfare 3. Also the ability to migrate host at any time during the match can occur regardless of if the host player leaves the game or not. If his ping starts to drop the switch will occur. Plus once you are back in the lobby, after a game ends, the system goes through and reselects a new host. It doesn’t just roll over with the same player next game.
During our interview we were able to get a few other community questions answered. Another topic we covered was the improvement of the spawn system in Modern Warfare 3. Rubin stated that there were significant improvements to the way spawns functioned, and Infinity Ward has the ability to tweak spawns post-launch via updates and hot-fixes.

There are multiple things that come into effect when you have spawning. There is obviously the shape of the map that determines how spawns feel and work. We have always in the past tried to make the maps so spawning works better, but it is one of those things that is just a difficult thing to just get right. It’s a constant learning process and it’s sort of trial and error. Usually when we are testing these modes we are testing where the spawns are, and we are making sure you aren’t getting spawn-trapped or spawning on top of yourself. Because the game is so fast paced and I can hit the button and get right back in the game, spawning is obviously a huge hurdle to get over.
Will you never see someone spawn? We can’t promise that, but we have reduced it as much as we can and there have been improvements to this game. One of the big improvements we did for this game was in Modern Warfare 2 we sort of got you too close to the battle. You spawned almost right inside the battle sometimes. So we have eased it out a little bit and tweaked those numbers, and you will find spawning is much better than last game.

In addition to being able to hot-fix spawn locations, Mark Rubin stated that over these past two years they have been focusing special attention on developing the ability to tweak key aspects of the game post-launch. This includes the ability to balance weapons, maps, spawns, game modes and more. Infinity Ward didn’t have these hot-fix and post-launch tweak abilities for Modern Warfare 2.
One final question we asked about was the knifing mechanics for Modern Warfare 3. Knifing is still a one-hit instant kill, but we inquired as to what changes were actually made and if there were any possible mechanics that got scrapped during development.

We have paired it down significantly from the last game. It’s not the knifing fest it was in Modern Warfare 2. There is no lightweight and no commando perks. Knifing now is more if you come around the corner you can tag a guy really fast, or you can sneak up behind and finish him that way. As for a new mechanic, it has been talked about but we never got far enough into a good solution to replace it. That is really where we are at. It might be something we look at though because, to be honest, I’m not a fan of knifing.

Mark Rubin was also able to confirm a few other various details about multiplayer. Mod Tools for the PC version of the game were still in determination. Also, the maps shipping with Modern Warfare 3 are all new to the series. However, he stated the potential to bring back maps from previous games is there.
With a only less than a month away until release, Modern Warfare 3 will be here before we know it!

Make sure to check in with my blog and DW24/7 often for all the latest news!

I know I am excited for the release--the news just keeps getting better and better! TC

MW3: Confirmed 4x XP in Latest Call of Duty Offering

From COD Community Forum:

EliteKnight seems to be asking the right questions and actually getting answers to them from Robert Bowling.

When he asked: @fourzerotwo from the Prestige shop in #MW3 if you unlock 2x XP and there is already 2x XP on MP would you get 4x XP ?

Robert Bowling answered with: @RK1EliteKnight Yes, you get 2x whatever the current xp scale is. It just doubles the playlist's default for a limited amount of time.

So this confirms you have the possibility to rake in 4x the usual XP at certain points in the game.

This makes me wonder. What happens when you add the double XP time from PepsiCo's "Rank Up Your Game with Double XP" promotion, would you get 8x XP for a limited period?

Wow--8x XP at certain times..Holy Shit. Might encourage people to prestige more often--What do you think?