Call of Duty Black Ops: Cold War should give you more freedom than its predecessors. And according to the Creative Director this is just the beginning.
The upcoming Call of Duty Black Ops: Cold War will give you more freedom in some missions than its predecessors. And it even brings some roleplaying elements like a (simple) character editor. For the developers at Raven Software, this is a way to move the series forward, as Senior Creative Director Dan Vondrak explains in an interview with GameSpot.
For him, one thing is clear: Call of Duty must continue to evolve. And this progress should go in the direction of playful freedom – at least that’s what Vondrak would like to see. In Cold War, this intention is to be implemented primarily in mission design.
Campaign should allow more freedom
CoD Cold War breaks new ground in mission design: In some chapters you make decisions, there are alternative approaches and sometimes optional tasks. For example, when you talk to a contact in a bar during a mission, you unlock an optional target.
To accomplish this, you sneak through a certain area and complete the task without using weapons. More trigger-happy characters should not be excluded, though: It is still possible to shoot your way through in the usual call-of-duty manner, or to concentrate solely on your main mission. Vodansk explains in an interview what the idea behind the additional objectives is:
“You can decide to do this optional objective or you can leave it out […]. The philosophy is to give the player a choice every now and then. Regardless of whether they make that choice or not, it provides freedom and fun.
But does that really go down well? The new approach of giving players more freedom was sometimes difficult even for the developers. For example, Vodansk says that some designers were overwhelmed with a KGB mission: In it, you move relatively freely through the headquarters of the Soviet secret service and choose between several possible approaches. It is still unclear how this will be received in the end: Fans at Reddit, for example, discuss intensively whether role-play-like elements really enrich Cold War.
n Future even more freedom in CoD?
Cold War should only be the beginning of the road to Vondrak. The developer hopes that future games in the series will rely even more on this open design philosophy:
“”I think games are better when players have freedom. And I hope this is just the beginning of something we can continue in Call of Duty.”””
So what could change in the future with CoD? Vondrak didn’t mention any concrete plans for the next series parts. However, from his statements it can be concluded that CoD campaigns could focus more on open areas and player decisions in the future. Whether and how this is actually implemented will of course also depend on the success of Cold War.
Whether the game actually achieves its goals, you can soon find out for yourself: Call of Duty Black Ops: Cold War will be released on November 13, 2020, and the PC preload is already available since November 10 – get ready for a larger download. We also explain everything about the integration of Warzone.
