Treyarch’s David Vonderhaar answers your nitty-gritty Black Ops II MP questions

I collected the questions I received from Call of Duty fans during Gamescom and asked Black Ops II Game Design Director David Vonderhaar for answers on this week’s podcast. The half-hour interview kicks in around the 24-minute mark, but I realize everybody doesn’t have the time to listen to the whole thing (but hey, you should make time, because it’s worth it to hear Vahn explain it himself).

Please remember that Black Ops II is still in development and some of Vahn’s answers are to be taken as indications of current thought, not promises of final features. As he says at the start of the interview, “We are in that phase of the project where we are dialing everything in.” With that caveat, here are some highlights from the full conversation:

On Second Chance/Last Stand/Final Stand:

There’s no Second Chance; there’s no Last Stand, there’s no Final Stand. There’s no combination whatsoever of perk or deathstreak that puts the guy in the “downed” state in multiplayer. It’s still used as the revival state in Zombies when you get downed. But it’s not in multiplayer — there is no perk and there are no deathstreaks, so there is no Final Stand or equivalent of it. Absolutely not. Please stop yelling at me.

On earning — and looping — scorestreak rewards:

Let me tell you where this is right now, and it’s something we are pretty happy with at this point. It does wrap around, but you can’t earn more than one of a type. Let’s say you took UAV and Counter UAV. If you earned the UAV then earned the Counter UAV, you’re going to start buildingagain for the UAV — but if you haven’t spent it, if you haven’t called it in or activated it, you’re not going to get a second one. You’re just going to get notified that you’re back at that part of the chain. You would definitely want to activate those scorestreaks so when you loop, you’ll get them again. It’s not like Black Ops 1, which is they just keep going forever and you effectively have to die to loop. You don’t have to die to loop at any point; you’ll just keep looping.

On leveling and gear acquisition:

When you start at level 1, you will start leveling up and you will get to level 4. You will unlock create-a-class and you will have four unlock tokens, one for each level. You will then have a range of things you can spend those unlock tokens on — but not everything. By the time you’re up to level 55, you have — surprise — 55 tokens. So along the way, you’ve been deciding how to spend those tokens on content that’s been level-gated. Level-gated content includes all the weapons, all the perks, all the equipment — tactical and lethal grenades — as well as the wildcards. Those things are all level-gated and they all require tokens to unlock.

Bam, I’m level 55, I have 55 things from anything that was available in create-a-class — but only 55, because you only get 55 tokens and there’s over 100 pieces of content. That’s 1 through 55. You go and you Prestige…the way we’re looking at this right at this moment in time is, because you’re Prestige, you can pick out one of those things and hold on to it as you continue through the Prestige progression. So 1 through 55 is set in stone, we’re happy with it. What we’re working on right now is making sure Prestige feels just as good.

On rewarding aggressive players with more score:

There are definitely events, particularly in objective-based game modes, where you are going to get more score for being on the aggressive side. For example, capturing a flag required you to get a flag in the first place. Those things are harder to do than, say, sitting at the back of your base, defending your flag. So those aggressive-style actions usually award more score, in general, because guys who are out trying to do those things die a lot more than the guys at the back of the field.

On removing all 10 of your Pick-10 points:

You have the combat knife in your hand if you are not carrying either a primary or a secondary weapon. We looked and thought about not doing that, and the truth of the matter is that it’s just very unusual to play the game with absolutely nothing in your hands, and just having your fists. It’s been this way for four or five months — if you are unequipped on primary or secondary, we have to give you a way to defend yourself and fight.

On the Black Ops II emblem creator:

There’s a lot more granularity and control over the colors. There are a lot more layers you can use. You can cut and copy an image from one layer into any layer in the stream — that helps create those illusion-style images that people like to do. Probably toward the end of September we’ll be actually be able to show it people.

On hearing your opponent’s microphone for a few seconds after you defeat them:

It’s an option that you can turn on and off in custom games. We gave it a name — “Revenge Voice.” It’s on in public games; we can turn it off in league play if we want. We love that thing — it’s funny.

On Black Ops II’s end-of-game scoreboards:

The scoreboard is specific to the game mode you’re playing. We try to find the most appropriate stats that are contributing to helping your team win — plants and defends, flag captures and defends, those kinds of things are on the scoreboard.

On determining a standard value for scoring events:

These are the values that we change a lot; we’ve changed them about three times since we got out of Gamescom already, and we’re going to keep changing them until we’re satisfied. We’re working very hard to find some level of standardization in certain types of events that are very common — like a kill. Should a kill be variable? Should it be 50, should it be 100? Can it be 50 in this mode and 100 in this? Does that make sense? So we’re working through that.

And this is not all — we also talked about perk balancing, killcam behavior, infinite sprint, camera support, livestreaming on PC, an abandoned idea for selling back gear, and a lot of other details that I know dedicated fans will want to know. Listen to the full interview for that stuff and more.