It’s a story we’ve no doubt heard in the past, but Treyarch has claimed that Call of Duty: Black Ops III will boast the franchise’s most complex, engaging plot to date – one that will even boast its own in-game wiki to chart the lore.
Mark Lamia, Studio Head at Treyarch, underlined the ways in which Black Ops III pushes the franchise forward in a recent interview Polygon, claiming that threequel will herald some of the best storytelling and fiction of the franchise thus far.
“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.”
While the knee-jerk reaction for many would be to immediately denounce Lamia’s comments – the gaming community is treated to essentially the same marketing speak every year, after all – there’s evidence to suggest that Treyarch could do go on at least part of its promise.
[zerggaming]Let’s no forget that Black Ops redefined the parameters of a Call of Duty campaign back in 2010; delivering a psychological thriller that helped establish the Black Ops IP as a bona fide sub franchise under the CoD branding.
Five years later, the creative team at Treyarch, with the power of current-gen hardware behind them, have the opportunity to truly experiment with the narrative within Black Ops III, particularly when you consider some of the game’s pressing themes of bioengineering and superintelligence. Time will tell whether the upcoming installment sets itself apart from what has come before, but for now, color us excited.
Treyarch will hope to one-up Advanced Warfare when Call of Duty: Black Ops III makes its debut across PlayStation 4, Xbox One and PC on November 6.
