The single-player campaign for Call of Duty: Black Ops 3 will have the most complex narrative out of any game in the series.
Call of Duty: Black Ops 3 will push the series forward in terms of storytelling, fiction, setting, and lore. Mark Lamia, Treyarch studio head, spoke to Polygon about the sort of changes Black Ops 3′s campaign is bringing to the Call of Duty formula.
“We create a very rich fiction. We look at Black Ops 2 and say, ‘OK, these drone strikes in 2025 occurred. What happens next in the world?’,” said Lamia. “We have a detailed wiki-like thing in the game. You might remember. You could hack into the computer in Black Ops. It’s in your safe house.
“It’s in your safe house. We have detailed out the world. We have a full history of where the EU goes. It’s our fiction, but it’s as we have projected it out, literally, in more detail than we’ve ever done.”
Lamia added that bringing warfare back to the ground again is part of that, because in the game’s story, air defences have been perfected to the point that it nullified all drone attacks and brought the fight back to the ground. Only this time, soldiers are technologically-enhanced and are accompanied by robots.
“We’re giving it to the player this time. This is stuff we usually do anyway, with our research,” Lamia said about allowing the players access to the game’s fiction.
“How do we come up with these settings? We literally just did our research and project out. We’re fortunate to have experts we can talk to. We’ve become futurist experts ourselves, living in this subject matter for so long. That’s going to be there for the player. It’s important.”
