WHAT? Seventh of the series Call of Duty.
WHERE? Santa Monica, California, TreyARCH Studio Office.
To your new game employees Treyarch They are extremely seriously. You begin to be aware of this at the moment when you find yourself in the negotiation room, in their office in Santa Monica, where they demonstrate to journalists Call of Duty: Black Ops.
More recently, it was the most ordinary negotiation in which the studio workers and its leadership were going to discuss pressing issues. Now she has turned into a real team bunker. Red lighting, in the center of the room – a long table painted under the stylized map of the world, on the walls – printouts of “secret documents” (there are, for example, greatly processed by censorship paper about the murder of Kennedy).
One of the walls is entirely closed by a huge screen, five meters diagonal. And when it lights up, when the game logo appears on it first, and then the first level prepared for demonstration, you finally understand the seriousness of the moment. Because it becomes clear: Treyarch "Dressers". They do not just follow in the footsteps of the creators of the series, Infinity Ward , And they do something special, something unusual, explosive, at the same time possessing all the characteristic features of Call of Duty and at the same time unique. They make their game.
Heated war
“We would very much like to fly to Moscow,” the head of the studio Mark Lamia admits, “but you think that it makes sense for you to meddle with such a game?"His fears are not groundless. About the scandal, inflated in Russia around Modern Warfare 2 (specifically – around the level of no Russian), probably all remember everything. And in Call of Duty: Black Ops, it so happened, Russians are killed almost constantly. Because as a setting for the new game Treyarch chose a cold war. And we look at what is happening through the eyes of the fighters of American special forces, and our compatriots appear here mainly in the crosshairs of sights (on the other hand, these are exclusively military – developers promise to be treated carefully).
Unlike the rest, Call of Duty, Black Ops is not devoted to any particular military conflict, but a whole period. The authors say that the plot will stretch for about 10 years and the player around the world is solely washing – from Cuba to Vietnam. But the first level demonstrated to us (its authors called WMD, that is, Weapons of Mass Destruption, “weapons of mass destruction”) is not dedicated to the war in the jungle and not landing in the Gulf of Pigs, but a secret operation in the Ural mountains.
The screen is getting dark, the date is displayed on it – 1968. When the darkness parted, we find ourselves in the skin of the pilot of the American stealth explorator SR-71 BlackBird. On the head – a helmet with an opaque rampage, the mortal body is covered in a complete pressure spacesuit. Airplanes like BlackBird rise much higher than civilian vessels, and 24 thousand meters of a simple oxygen mask are not enough. A short passage along the runway (preparing a “bird” for the flight of equipment stretch out into Frunt and give us honor), climb into the cabin, start! The picture seems to go back, creating a feeling of frantic speed, and then gets dark again.
Fast rewinding, and now we are already over https://golden-lion-gb-casino.co.uk/ Soviet territory, in the body of the second crew member. He watches what is happening on Earth, and leads a detachment abandoned into the communist rear. His (our) task: to prevent the fighters to be discovered. Several movements with sticks, pressing the button – our comrades, having received a team, are advanced from an occupied position.
But what is it? The Soviet convoy moves along the way. We order the soldiers to hide in a successfully tired hut, and then get out through the back door. Rewinding again … and now we are on Earth, in the very detachment that was commanded a second ago. About a meter away from us carefully wanders about the snowdrifts patrol. A little later, Mark will explain that in most such situations the player will have a choice of what to do: try to stay unnoticed or twist the shutter and solve all issues radically. This time the patrol was lucky – we wait until they move away. The command "is moving forward!", And fighters are withdrawn from places.
A minute later, after a little run in fresh snow, the team is at the cliff, on the roof of a hopper hollowed in a rock. Fighters are fixed with carabiners of ropes, transplanted over the railing. Our hero with a partner is synchronously repelled from the wall, planted along the pool into the window located just below and flew into the room. Rapid turns on for a few moments.
The soldiers in the room in amazement open their mouths, get a pool and loses the ability of something to be surprised forever. A little later we observe the same scene from the new angle. This time we ourselves are inside the bunker (already another), and the second squad bursts inside the windows inside. The scene is quite in the spirit of Call of Duty – fragments fly in all directions, shots rattles, a selected mat. The demonstration ends with the fact that our detachment gets from an avalanche and sits together down from a tall cliff. We manage to observe their free fall (“control the flight with the help of the left stick,” the game helpfully suggests), but parachutes are already opened behind the scenes. The screen goes out, light is lit in the room.
We are from Saigon
The American special forces SOG, in the role of a fighter of which we will hold about half the game, was founded in 1964, was based in Saigon and was engaged in intelligence and sabotage activities in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. His name SOG members in different situations deciphered in different ways: when they worked openly-Special Operations Group (group for special operations), and when they did not want to attract excess attention-Studies and Observation Group (study and observation group).
The unit granted the widest powers. The command determined only the goals of his operations, and the methods of achieving SOG came up with itself. They say that the group fighters could easily throw even a general from a passing car and requisition his transport for their purposes. In addition, they were the first to give out samples of experimental weapons, not yet put into serial production.
The special forces were dissolved in May 1972.
Ho Shi Mina
“One of our main tasks was to ensure a variety of gameplay,” says Mark. In his opinion, this used to think the player in terms of levels of levels – “it is interesting that they will show me at the next stage” – and today the games are made according to other, much higher standards. Modern developers need to constantly throw a person at the screen something new. “Now it’s not enough just to launch a person into the room, giving him a weapon,” adds Adam Gasker, the Treyarch design director.
In fact, they might not have done these explanations – already during the demonstration of the first level, the priorities of the team became absolutely clear. Switching between the characters, the regular rate of the pace, familiar to all fans of Call of Duty, masterfully adjusted scripts that do not break the gameplay, but complement it, all this suggests that Black Ops will be whatever, just not monotonous.
Pieces of several more levels that show us after WMD only strengthen this impression in us. One of them, unfolding on the streets of the Vietnamese city of Hue, attacked by an army of northerners, is an almost complete opposite of the adventure in the Urals. There is no talk of secrecy here: there is a war around us, shells are torn, the northerners screaming into megaphones (“American soldiers! This is not your war! We do not wish you evil!"), Who scatter where the civilian. And our new hero, a member of the secret unit SOG (about it and about Operation 40, the second organization that appears in the plot of Black Ops, read in the inserts), rushes around the burning city, trying to get to the team of the Americans and save the bag with the most important documents, watering enemies of lead and periodically calling helicopters to the help.
Another level, and again – a completely different gameplay. Here, on the contrary, the main emphasis is on stealth. Having got out of the wreckage of the knocked out helicopter, we first deal with the gathers at the place of crash by the Viet Congors, hiding behind their comrade as a shield (the last lamp, beautifully in Rapid, blows the skull to one of the Vietnamese), and then we will steal through the jungle for a long time, we will take a long time for the patrols, we spend a lot of time Under water, where we attach explosives to the piles of houses, and the last third of the stage is completely spent in the dark and dampness of the famous Viet Congs tunnels.
Finally, the fourth (and the last of shown to us) the level consists entirely of the flight on the stolen Mi-24. Below are frightened enemy soldiers (and lie down under the bursts of our machine gun and missile volleys), other helicopters fly out for interception, traces of reactive shells launched from the ground are drawn in the sky. Blood at one second is so saturated with adrenaline that it is difficult to even just sit still – you dodge every rocket with your whole body.
Operation decommunization
Unlike SOG, whose members, whatever one may say, risked their own lives in the war, the Operation 40 activity (in its ranks we will fight the second half of the game) raises much more questions. The unit organized by the CIA in reality was almost exclusively engaged in the struggle against the Fidel Castro regime in Cuba, completely without constraining moral issues. So, during the explosion of the LE Cubre cargo ship, which was organized by Operation 40 in early March, 1960, 75 people died, and more than 200 were injured. The victims were mainly civilians. Moreover, there were two bombs, and the second – according to the authors of the attack – was supposed to destroy those who rush to help the wounded.
In general, the whole history of Operation 40 is dotted with doubtful moments. They trained Cuban anti-communists with the latest torture methods, organized the famous landing of pigs in April 1961, the purpose of which was to overthrow Castro, and in the 70s some members of the unit were involved in the Watergate scandal. We hope that in Black Ops we will not be forced to do anything like that.
Mechanisms
What is happening behind the Black Ops development scenes is no less interesting than, in fact, the game itself. For example, Treyarch is very proud of how they reformed the process of recording movements, starting to work on a new project. “Previously,” they say, “everything was done in three tricks. First, the movements of the body of each actor were removed, then the sound was recorded, and then the head of the head was made ". So, according to the developers, it was easier, but the quality of the final product with this approach suffered a little. Even the voice acting turned out to be emasculated, deprived of many little things that make the sound “alive”: the actors, although they tried, in the end, still simply read the script lines in the microphone, and did not really play.
Now everything is recorded immediately, in one entry – movements, facial expressions, sound. To demonstrate the result, we are shown a video. In the background is played by an actor, covered with special sensors, and on the front – a polygonal character (“He is still raw – there are not enough effects”) repeats his movement. The lyceum breathes heavily (he just jumped into the partisan tunnel) and squints (according to the script they shine in his eyes with a flashlight) – the model does the same. The effect is amazing: even an unfinished character looks completely alive. The impression only intensifies when we are shown a scene with the participation of two heroes (and, accordingly, two actors), the exchange of replicas when applying a new shooting method is much more natural. Although a treacherous thought creeps up in the head: how much everything will be lost during localization.
But what definitely cannot be spoiled by any translation is the modified artificial intelligence of opponents. The Soviet special forces are especially shining. According to the developers (which the consultant told about this, the former special forces himself), the Soviet super -soldiers are primarily taught not to shoot and fight, but on the contrary – to dodge the bullets. Move.
Tried to teach this their soldiers and Treyarch. For the first time in a day, a gamepad is given to us in our hands (before that, the entire gameplay was shown by the studio employee). On the TV screen is a small platform created specifically for demonstrating AI. We are at one end, and on the other – four figures in camouflage. “Come on, try to kill them,” Adam grins. Four are removed and begin to move in our direction, shooting from the "Kalashnikov". We bring weapons to one of the soldiers, pull the trigger … The shot is rattling, but where the bullets went, there is already nobody. The special forces predicted the development of events and at the last moment he someded aside and a little forward – dodged the deadly lead, continuing the movement. The developers smile and say that, for example, partisans from Viet Kong will behave differently in the game – they were not shown such tricks in training.
By the way, about the consultant from special forces in Treyarch literally compose legends. Describing it, the studio employees most often use the adjective intense (“powerful”). Entering the next cabinet, you can suddenly hear from its inhabitants that “here Sonny’s designers were wetted”, and the head of the department of the animators, literally choking with delight, tells how the Russian taught him to distort the bolt of the gun with one hand, and made somersaults in front of the camera with a heavy remark of the AK-47, and in response to the request “to fulfill this movement a little differently, so that it looks better”, he sparkled with his eyes and barked: “No!"
Specialonline
While Treyarch shows only the single -user part of Black Ops. They only talk a little about the multiplayer, answering every second question: “Excuse me, we can’t talk about it yet,” and they ask to go later. But we still managed to get some of them from them.
The developers understand that in recent years the role of multiplayer in Call of Duty has incredibly increased, and take the corresponding steps. So, they doubled the size of the team that works on the team game, and began to engage in a multi -user part much earlier than usual (according to TreyARCH employees, the Black Ops multiplayer has already been spent twice as much as it was allocated to solve the same problems in World at War). Huge attention is paid to cards and testing – the team gathers every day, plays, and then discusses what could be improved, which elements to add, and which, on the contrary, get rid of.
The character’s development system is promised (no one pronounces the words “Modern Warfare”, but they literally hang in the air) and some “social elements”, although there is no specificity in this regard yet.
In the multiplayer, unlike the single, it will be possible to play not only for the Americans, but also for the Soviet special forces, and they will necessarily include a cooperative – both online and on one screen. True, judging by the vague description (this is just one of those things that are “not yet said”), it will rather resemble a joint regime from Splinter Cell: Convaction – not the pair passage of ordinary missions, but a separate campaign.
* * *
Over the years, Treyarch is becoming more competent as developers. Progress was noticeable for a long time – Call of Duty: World at War was a stronger game than Call of Duty 3 (Remember at least the Japanese ambush at the first level and suddenly illuminated the jungle rocket – haven't you shuddered then?). But the difference between her and Black Ops is even more obvious. While Infinity Ward copied themselves (“In the last game we had a scene with an atomic bomb … And in this it will be … only in orbit!"), Treyarch was looking for ways to refresh the franchise.
And if the creators of Call of Duty now have turned into a collective industrial Michael Bay, then their eternal leaders are quite worthy to be called collective Stephen Spielberg. It seems that both make mass products, but the former of the first rests on some special effects, and the latter still has something behind the soul, besides pyrotechnics and computer graphics.