We’ve seen a shift in gaming these days, that is starting to focus more on online action than the single-player experience. Strangely enough, one game that is planning to put a lot more focus on drawing players back to the main campaign, is Call of Duty: Black Ops 2, as the developers have some ideas in mind with which to keep that aspect alive.
Speaking to The Guardian, Treyarch studio head Mark Lamia said that one of the things that the developer was planning on doing, was adding branching storylines and new paths for players to explore, in the upcoming future warfare title.
“There is something that multiplayer has, but the campaign hasn’t had so much of: replayability”, Lamia said.
If you look at the Strikeforce levels, and you look at us going after choice and sandbox gameplay, what it does is put replayability inside the campaign.
Look at the branching storylines: all these things, I believe, will drive people who enjoy the campaign experience to go back and play it again, because you’re going to have some new paths that you didn’t experience, or even in the case of Strikeforce levels, levels that you didn’t even play: it’s possible that you might not play all the Strikeforce levels on your first play-through. And then there are the story-endings.
I think the goal at the highest level from a design perspective was accessibility plus depth of gameplay plus replayability. To me, for a campaign, that’s the Holy Trinity.
Sounds pretty solid, but if these paths are just going to be more opportunities to do the exact same actions with a different background, there won’t be much of a point to them. Let’s hope that Treyarch makes the alternative choice something worthwhile to explore, when the game launches toward the end of this year.
Last Updated: June 21, 2012