Treyarch Pushes Beyond Modern Warfare With Call Of Duty: Black Ops 2

04.06.2012
Activision is pushing things forward with its Call of Duty franchise. Treyarch's Black Ops 2 is on display at 2012 with an epic campaign storyline that propels the action to 2025. Fans of the '80s will also be in for a treat with some playable levels during that period in American history, which should serve as a nice contrast to the drone and robot-controlled future warfare gameplay. Mark Lamia, studio head at Treyarch, talks about what's in store in this November 13 release in this exclusive interview.

Game On: What were your goals heading into Black Ops 2 after the success that we've seen, year after year, with each new Call of Duty game?

Mark Lamia: The goals coming in to Black Ops 2 were quite simply to push the boundaries of the franchise. Players have had a lot of great Call of Duty experiences leading up to this point and we were really excited about what we created with , but that was our first time together as a studio. We felt like we had just really scratched the surface of what we could create. We felt we could do so much more, so we really wanted to introduce a lot of new elements to Call of Duty. It's a difficult balancing act.

What are the challenges of trying new things with your fan base?

There are a lot of people who love their Call of Duty, but when you're making a game for such a broad audience and you're also making a game in a franchise that you've made a lot of like Treyarch has, we wanted to create new experiences for players. Black Ops characteristically had a lot of uniqueness to it and we wanted to use that as a launching point in creating Black Ops 2. That's why we took not only the near-future fiction, but made it generation-spanning and had the characters from Black Ops 1 in the game. We're going to continue their story, but also introduce new characters, juxtaposing different kinds of warfare. The warfare that people are more familiar with in Call of Duty games will be there with a totally new kind of warfare.

How does this near-future setting impact the historical aspect of past Treyarch games?