Treyarch is breaking with three lane-map tradition for Call of Duty: Black Ops 3’s Descent DLC

Every developer has a signature in their game design. Studios like Double Fine focus on quirky visuals over realism, Blizzard enjoys outfitting their characters with wildly impractical armour and Treyarch has a habit of making multiplayer maps for Call of Duty that largely focus on three lanes of attack. That’s according to Call of Duty fans at least, who claim that Treyarch’s signature map design relies a bit too heavily on the golden rule of threes.

Or does it? There’s a reason why three is the best prime number for anything in life, from photography to ice cream flavours on one cone. And while Treyarch is aware of that criticism, they’re still sticking to their guns largely for the upcoming Descent DLC for Call of Duty: Black Ops 3. But there will be at least one map that’ll satisfy their more vocal fans.

“At Treyarch, we kind of get yelled at and knocked because ‘Oh Treyarch, you only know how to make a three-lane map’. The funny thing is, is that if you look at other successful developers and I’m talking like CS and old-school Quake and IW’s COD 4 which is hailed as one of the greatest CODs, you’ll have three-lane maps. This is like inherent to really good map design. It’s not a Treyarch specific thing,” Black Ops 3 multiplayer producer Miles Leslie said of the Rumble map.

But the interesting thing that we’re doing with Rumble is that there’s only two lanes. We kind of flipped it on its head in this stadium where these mechs battle and there’s an interior lane that connects to the exterior and in this large arena area you can use the mechs as cover but in the center of it there’s a bunker and you really want to hold this bunker down because it can engage in these overwatch windows that overlook this arena and it also has a tunnel that connects to the interior.

So its got a lot of really unique aspects that we haven’t done before that rally makes it feel different and I think players will respond to it.

As for the rest of the DLC, there’ll be plenty of strategy required to get a match win. Especially in maps such as Empire and Berserk. “There’s Empire, which is the remake of Raid,” Leslie said.

It was the right time to finally bring it back, in this Roman villa. The next one is Berserk, which is a cool map, a village that has been carved into a mountain and the really unique thing about this map is that in the center of this map is a bridge and its got a really hard choke, you want to fight over this bridge.

But the unique thing is that there’s a canyon leading from one of the lanes into the center of this bridge area and you can either jump on it or go underneath the bridge and completely avoid and connect to the other lane. So this is something that we haven’t done before, you can completely avoid the center lane if possible and it’s really awesome if you’re playing a game mode like Uplink or CTF. It offers some really unique gameplay that we haven’t seen before.

The Descent DLC pack drops first on PlayStation on July 12.

Last Updated: July 5, 2016