Sixty-five years after the end of World War II, the conflict seems to have lost its attraction for video game developers.
Storied video game franchises like Medal of Honor,
Battlefield and Brothers in Arms seem to have either died off or turned
to modern settings after producing more than 20 games set in the
battles of World War II’s six years.
The last Battlefield game had a modern setting, so
does the next Medal of Honor title. And after four successful World War
II-based games, it looks like Call of Duty is giving up all together on
that era.
Activision has been flying high on the business of
turning armed conflict into entertainment for nearly a decade, pumping
out tremendously successful Call of Duty games every year since 2003.
The publisher manages the seemingly impossible,
releasing a game that takes nearly two years to make annually, by
hot-swapping developers, cycling the popular series between the game’s
originators Infinity Ward and developers Treyarch.
Last year’s Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 was
developed by Infinity Ward. This year’s Call of Duty: Black Ops comes
from Treyarch.
It will be the first Call of Duty game that Treyarch
makes not set in World War II. Instead, the upcoming Black Ops will
take place in the 1960s and ’70s, taking gamers through the secretive,
often unbelievable, birth of modern unconventional warfare.
the transition from creating a game of war based on World War II to one
that explores the cold war sparked an “explosion of creativity” inside
the studio.
“In the beginning, a lot of people didn’t know much
about the Cold War because it was so secretive,” Bunting said. “But,
you start doing the research, you start seeing how interesting that era
was. We’re just now getting the information about it and the stuff that
went on was just crazy. Once we started doing the research, people
started getting really jazzed about working on this.”
Bunting says the results will be a game unlike anything they’ve ever done in Call of Duty and team’s best work to date.
Treyarch and Activision are keeping a pretty tight
lid on the upcoming shooter, but they have shown off a number of
settings, including the snowy mountains of cold-war
near the end of that war. Bunting said the game spans a range of times,
with the story arc covering a broad span of time between the late ’60s
and early ’70s.
“We haven’t revealed all the locations in the game
yet but I can tell you that it does take you through a variety of
locations around the world,” he said. “You saw some snowy Russian
environments, you saw
of course, but there’s much more in store that you haven’t seen yet. It
does take you through a variety of locales in both the Eastern and
Western Hemispheres.”
Bunting added that Call of Duty: Black Ops will have
gamers taking on the role of multiple characters over the course of the
game.
“The story is all interwoven, so there’s a much
deeper character narrative going on in this story,” he said. “When the
game comes out, when you start seeing more information about it, you’ll
see that there is a large story arc going on with multiple characters
involved and you have to follow each of these different character arcs
to understand how they all play together.”
That means a game more dependent on narrative and,
perhaps, moral quandaries than those early Call of Duty games set in
World War II.
War gaming’s shift in time and tone could be in part due to
own recent experiences with war. Video game developers no longer have
to look to history for relevant topics about conflict and warfare.
The latest Medal of Honor title, for instance, takes place in modern-day
But they do run the danger of dealing with topics that have yet to be fully explored, or even understood.
Perhaps that too is part of the attraction.
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