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Tag: treyarch

  • Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 Zombies Is Tapping Into Its Past to Guide Its Future – Xbox Wire

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    With 80 levels and more than 20 arenas, coupled with outrageous firepower, Dead Ops Arcade 4 will have you unleash the hurt against the Silverback clan’s armies and their vengeful new patriarch, Papaback. And for the first time, DOA embraces Round-Based Zombies mechanics with Ammo Mods, Field Upgrades, and GobbleGums, all tailored to enhance your Dead Ops Arcade experience. Also, both top-down and first-person camera options are supported, letting you switch perspectives without losing pace. Best of all, every DOA run contributes to shared progression, earning XP that advances your player level across Campaign, Multiplayer, Zombies, and Call of Duty: Warzone. “Leveraging a lot of our enemy types, seeing those and even fighting them in a different way has been really cool,” says Drew. “It feels like a cohesive and massive offering, which is great.”

    And with launch approaching soon on November 14, I was curious to know if Drew could shed some light on what we can look forward to down the road. “You’re not going to know what to expect. Looking at our lineup this year, each map is going to bring something different to the table. And that is going to be a lot of fun for fans to experience with extra layers of things to uncover.”

    With an awesome Wonder Vehicle to drive around, many compelling locations to explore, and what sounds like a tremendous number of surprises hiding within the Dark Aether, Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 Zombies is shaping up to slay starting November 14.

    Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 launches November 14, 2025, for Xbox Series X|S, Xbox One, Xbox on PC, ROG Xbox Ally handhelds, Cloud, Battle.net, Steam, PlayStation 5, and PlayStation 4. It is an Xbox Play Anywhere title and available day one with Game Pass Ultimate and PC Game Pass.

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    Mike Nelson, Xbox Wire Editor

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  • “Every Lane Needs a Purpose” – How Treyarch Crafts Multiplayer Maps for Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 – Xbox Wire

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    One of the things that made Black Ops 6 Multiplayer stand out was introducing a new way for players to move through the maps with Omnimovement – a feature that allows you to sprint, slide, and dive in any direction with a full 360-degress range of motion. It was perhaps one of the biggest game changers to come to Multiplayer in years. New for Black Ops 7 will be wall jumps, which have given matches an even greater level of verticality and speed, in addition to a refined version of Omnimovement. When the crafting process starts, I wanted to know at which point do these new and distinct gameplay features play a role in how a map is built – is it from inception or later in the process?

    “I think it can be both, but usually it’s from inception,” Scronce tell me. “Where a map like Blackheart, for example, which was in the Beta, that map has wall jumps that go over a grinder. So, for sure, new mechanics are considered. I think, when everything turns out the best is when everybody’s kind of aware and driving towards the same goal. But there are maps where you start playing them, and then you’re like, ‘Oh, it’d be really cool if I could do this…’ That might not be a wall jump opportunity, but perhaps a sneaky, clever opportunity. Maybe we’ll put a piece of plywood down to tell you that you can jump here, and the team will shape it a little bit more.”

    “When we’re looking at stuff and talking about different maps, before they’re even starting paper design, it’s like, ‘What’s the intention of this map?’” adds Miller. “Do we want it to be a big map, but [have] the engagements be close? What are the goals? And some of it could be we want this to be a map where it’s about finding flank routes and moving constantly, versus a map where it’s about finding good cover, posting up, and kind of head-to-head battles.”

    No player wants every map to play the same way, which circles back to how features like Omnimovement and wall jumps can feed into making each of these maps feel distinct, whether they are leaning into these new features or not. “You can kind of learn from that in the design. And then, of course, the community figures out other ways of being successful in maps… and we make changes,” Miller says.

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    Mike Nelson, Xbox Wire Editor

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  • Call Of Duty: Black Ops 6 Jacks Up XP Rewards In First Update

    Call Of Duty: Black Ops 6 Jacks Up XP Rewards In First Update

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    Screenshot: Activision

    Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 is a game about shadowy organizations causing geopolitical turmoil and well-timed headshots. It’s also an RPG about making the progress meters fill up. When it comes to the latter, Black Ops 6‘s first patch is already increasing XP rewards for certain modes to keep the level-ups flowing.

    An October 26 update for the game listed a handful of changes and bug fixes, including a series of map exploits, a problem with matches quickly replacing players that leave, and various glitches in Black Ops 6‘s well-received Zombies mode. The changes that are most noteworthy were to XP, though. Four modes will now get boosted rewards.

    Increased XP and Weapon XP rates for modes that were awarding less XP than expected

    • Team Deathmatch
    • Control
    • Search & Destroy
    • Gunfight

    “Our team is closely monitoring XP rates for all modes to ensure players are progressing as expected wherever they play,” the development team wrote. XP earned and other rewards often start out a little stingier at launch since it’s always easier to increase them later once the data from millions of people playing comes back, rather than the reverse.

    There are already lots of different strategies for optimizing XP gain in multiplayer. Obviously, playing better—landing headshots, chasing objectives, and unloading killstreaks—all accrue rank-ups faster. Some players also recommend playing Hardpoint instead of Domination because players in that mode are more likely to actually play objectives. Others suggest grinding out all of those camo challenges. And, of course, no new Call of Duty launch is complete without sickos crushing cases of Monster Energy for double XP.

    Black Ops 6 players had latched onto one easy trick for getting bonus XP by exploiting the decoy grenades for guaranteed kill assists. Treyarch nerfed that one in the above patch as well, though.

         

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    Ethan Gach

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  • Report: Devs Worked Nights And Weekends To Rush Modern Warfare III Out

    Report: Devs Worked Nights And Weekends To Rush Modern Warfare III Out

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    Image: Activision

    Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III’s single-player campaign was panned by critics when it released early on November 2. Reviewers hit it with low scores and said it felt short, rushed, and incomplete. Now Bloomberg reports that the game was rushed out in half the time of a normal Call of Duty sequel, with devs working nights and weekends to meet Activision’s annualized sales goals.

    According to Bloomberg, the game was originally pitched to Sledgehammer developers as an expansion to Modern Warfare II that would focus on missions based in Mexico instead of the series’ normal globetrotting set-pieces. In the summer of 2022, however, Activision executives apparently rebooted the project as a full-fledged sequel about the Modern Warfare II villain Vladimir Makarov. The company needed to fill the gap left by an apparent delay of Treyarch’s next Call of Duty game, and reportedly decided against simply taking a year off from the blockbuster’s annual release schedule.

    Read More: Modern Warfare III’s Campaign Mostly Sucks

    A spokesperson for Activision denied this, however. Sledgehammer Games studio head Aaron Halon told Bloomberg in an interview that the developers who thought Modern Warfare III had originally been planned as an expansion were simply confused because it was a “new type of direct sequel,” despite the PlayStation 5 version of the game appearing as DLC on the trophies menu and asking some players to insert the Modern Warfare II disc.

    But more than a dozen current and former Call of Duty developers told Bloomberg that Halon’s take “conflicted” with what they were initially told. Some of them also seemingly worked nights and weekends to try and get Modern Warfare III out on time, despite the game only having half the development time of a normal Call of Duty sequel. “They felt betrayed by the company because they were promised they wouldn’t have to go through another shortened timeline after the release of their previous game, Call of Duty: Vanguard, which was made under a similarly constrained development cycle,” Bloomberg reports.

    Call of Duty has made billions for Activision, but the series has a long and increasingly-well-documented track record of burning out its developers. One of the big questions facing the franchise now that Microsoft owns it (after recently closing its $69 billion acquisition of Activision Blizzard) is whether it will continue the seemingly unsustainable development cycles or let the blockbuster take a year off for the first time in decades.

     

                

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    Ethan Gach

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  • 18-Year Call of Duty Veteran Announces He’s Leaving Activision

    18-Year Call of Duty Veteran Announces He’s Leaving Activision

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    Image: Activision

    After 18 years, David Vonderhaar, the studio design director at Treyarch, announced he’s leaving Activision after shipping eight Call of Duty games since 2004.

    Vonderhaar made the announcement on his personal LinkedIn account, where he confirmed he’s moved on to a new project at a different studio but didn’t go into specifics in his post. He also thanked his former coworkers at Treyarch and the Call of Duty fans that have played the studio’s games over the years.

    Today I am sharing that I have left Activision and Treyarch after an incredible 18 years and 8 Call of Duty games.

    To my co-workers at Treyarch, I am immensely grateful for the time we invested working to improve our craft, never sitting on successes, and always wondering how to improve what we design and how we produce it.

    Thank you to the Call of Duty community for your passion and enthusiasm. That energy has often fueled our determination as a studio and individuals. I will always be grateful for the opportunity to interact with so many of you directly online and in person. This energy will always be a massive part of me.

    I am staying in the games industry, working on an undisclosed project I can’t discuss yet, but I am excited about a rare and unique opportunity. I’ll update you as soon as possible.

    Vonderhaar’s Call of Duty portfolio is synonymous with the Black Ops series, which has been part of the military shooter’s rotating stable of sub-franchises since the first one launched in 2010. The most recent entry was 2020’s Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War.

    Earlier this week, Activision and Sledgehammer Games unveiled that the next Call of Duty game will be called Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III, not to be confused with Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3, as the new game is part of the rebooted Modern Warfare sub-series that began in 2019.

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    Kenneth Shepard

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