icrosoft wasn’t messing about with its Xbox showcase this year. After a raft of announcements about job losses and studio closures, the company looked to give gamers what they wanted in its Sunday night Summer Game Fest slot, ending with a full 40-minute preview of Call of Duty: Black Ops 6, a game so large it will require a 300GB download,even for the single-player mode, due to the amount of textures it’s going to be streaming from remote servers.
Call of Duty titles are usually built over a tight two-year period, but for this one, co-developers Treyarch and Raven had twice that time. “We really were given the opportunity to redefine what a Black Ops game is,” says associate design director Matt Scronce. “We could be very intentional about every single decision that we made along the way. In the past, each game was kind of built off the last one, but with this one, it really was kind of ground floor build – a redefinition of Black Ops.
Now players have 360 degrees of movement in which to sprint, dive and slide, which should allow for a greater variety of evasive manoeuvres – you can go supine and roll under cover, or even recreate that classic movement from Hong Kong action movies of the era: sliding backwards on your behind while shooting forward. Naturally, the system required thousands of new frames of animation and mo-cap, which could only have happened with that extra development time.