Members of the Black Ops team were quite busy on the Callofduty.com forums yesterday, releasing some important information finally putting some rumors that have been buzzing around the ‘net to rest.
David Vonderhaar, lead design director of Treyach, created a thread regarding tactical insertions and why he feels there will be no boosting threat in Black Ops. He also discusses why they left them in multiplayer even after people expressed their hatred for the booster’s favorite tool since the beginning of MW2. Community Manager Josh Olin also pops in to explain why we will not be seeing mass amounts of gore in the new game.
Vahn – Vonderhaar’s username and nickname – mentions a common complaint often heard during gameplay ” What a horrible spawn! Why would I spawn here?!” He counters with, ” So, here you go. Here is Tac Insert. Pick your own spawn point and stop yelling at me.”
Touche, Vahn. Point taken.
He also makes a very valid point about the importance of including equipment like tac inserts into objective based game types like demolition, “A well organized team of Tac Insert user can roll the competition in Demo. It’s grand, really, and how it should be.”
However, the best news in the whole post was his announcement of it being excluded in the free-for-all modes. Core and **** will not be seeing boosters camping for kills in the corner of a map somewhere. This is an excellent step in the right direction, would have been quite handy to the fans of free-for-all in Modern Warfare 2. But in all honesty, are we going to be seeing boosters trying to acheive those 11 killstreaks? I can understand hitting that magical 25th killstreak, it’s pretty rough. But, if you are camping to get 11 or under, you are pretty sad to begin with. I may even feel sorry enough not to kill you if you are trying to boost to that. Of course, I will, because I like raining on someone’s parade.
The only thing I was sadden to see included was the new ability of canceling your tac during your killcam. I find the camping of tactical insertions useful to certain degree. For one, if you are doing well, that guy is going to be sitting out of action for a long time just waiting for you to be vulnerable during the spawn. He is basically throwing away the potential to gain multiple kills just for one measly cheap shot. This is a benefit for your team, because the enemy team have now become a man down by this guy’s choice. I find it perfectly okay to take one for your team. And although the odds aren’t in your favor with this one, there are some opportunities to kill the camper and catch him off guard. I’ve done this numerous times by spawning shooting or immediately knifing. Or just sprinting right away and confusing the hell out of them. A lot of satisfaction can be had by accomplishing that rare deed. The main point is that the possibility of having someone waiting for you to spawn is the downfall of choosing this piece of equipment. I think they all have pros and cons, and that it isn’t much of a negative for me to avoid using it.
Josh Olin, more commonly known as JD_2020, was also in the forums that day explaining why the bloody body parts, a favorite sight in World at War, will not be coming making a comeback. The reasoning is the RAM space located within the consoles. The memory space was needed for all the cool new customizations and something had to give, but I would take a kickass looking emblem and some cool, colorful reticles over the gore any day! Besides, there will still be blood. “Splatter blood effects,” Olin says. Works for me!
David Vonderhaar also spoke to Techland.com a few days ago regarding some of the in-game features and how leveling and currency were to be handled. You still have to unlock things by going up levels, but once you get there, you will have to purchase what you want in order to use it.
Vonderhaar also mentions ways to gain some of that money. Leveling up will earn you some dough, as will contracts, wager matching, and of course how well you fair in a regular game.
Theater Mode is discussed and Vahn shares some more information about how this feature works. Your recent saved games will be located in ‘my recent games’ and from there, you can choose a game and save it to your file share, where it will remain forever.
http://bigpwner.com/2010/09/10/black-ops-tactical-insertions-news-and-more/