Last night, the first Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 trailer debuted at the rather odd time of 8PM on a Tuesday. The existence of the title was the worst kept secret in the industry for months, but the premise? It caught more than a few people off guard.
Call of Duty has moved from World War II to Vietnam to present day over the past decade, and now they're going one step beyond that. Black Ops 2 reveals that it takes place a few decades in the future, and the clear and present threat to national security is the nation's automated defense drones and robots which have been hijacked by the enemy. In short, it seems we'll be fighting Skynet.
Shooting up robots seems rather un-Call of Duty-like, as does running away from hoverjets on horseback which is what appears to be happening in one sequence in the trailer. It's all rather silly on the surface, but let's keep in mind that the last Black Ops game had JFK and Richard Nixon blowing the heads off zombies together, and everyone liked that. It's also necessary to remember that the biggest complaints leveled against the franchise have been that it hasn't changed enough from installment to installment, and it seems like Treyarch is doing their part to try and keep things fresh during Infinity Ward's off year.
It may be different for Call of Duty, but is it different...really? A second gripe about the industry as a whole is that there are too many grizzled space marine shooters, and on first glance this would seem to be another one added onto the pile. Presumably even with new skins and new guns crafted for a not-so distant future, the game will still be Call of Duty at its core, and I wonder what, if any, gameplay advancements will actually show up as the series moves into another era.
That said, Treyarch knew that had to at least break out of their own mold a little bit with this next game. They could have done the ultimate safe thing, and just had Black Ops 2 be about some secret Cold War op, but this is a drastically different direction for the series at least from a concept perspective. At the very least, it may take those gamers who have been on the fence about the repetitiveness of the series, and bait them into returning by offering a new setting. As fatigued as I may be with the last few titles, I have to admit I'm a bit curious myself. I'm not sure how I feel about the Terminator-esque plotline, as it's going to be strange shooting at mechs instead of humans which is what the trailer appears to show (on horseback!), but it's the multiplayer where the game will really sink or swim. And with how many sales these titles rack up year after year, I think it's going to have very little trouble at least floating.
I think they may have been better off just ditching the "Black Ops" identifier altogether. Yes, it has characters from the old game (you reportedly play as Mason's son), but was it really necessary to continue a plot set in the '70s to one set in 2030, which has almost nothing to do with its predecessor? Call of Duty: Future Warfare, or something similar, would have been a more eye catching title. How exactly is it a "Black Op" when entire cities are being leveled by robots and humanity has to band together to fight them. For the third time, it's Terminator.
So yes, it's good that Treyarch is getting out of their own box, but in the larger sense, I'm not sure how much they're actually innovating with another futuristic FPS that will likely use the exact same mechanics as past games. I think Infinity Ward is going to be very confused about what to do next year after this, however. They can't make their game in future too (can they?), and there's no way Modern Warfare 4 wouldn't seem incredibly stale at this point, even to longtime fans. The Civil War maybe? Joking. Maybe. You never can tell with this bunch. If so, I'll look forward to putting an ACOG on my musket.
