Black Ops III is the first Treyarch made Call of Duty game given a three-year development cycle thanks to the addition of Sledgehammer Games to the rotation. According to the team, the added year of development was of utmost importance for all of the changes and additions to this year’s release.
 
For the campaign, players are not only given new abilities that can be used on any level, but those levels are designed to be more open and playable with up to four players. All of these changes inspired Treyarch to take a new approach to artificial intelligence in Black Ops III, allowing for different experiences over the course of multiple playthroughs. “The A.I. system is completely rewritten.” Lamia says. “It’s adaptive, it has to deal with emergent situations, it has to deal with the variety of different characters that you have. Call of Duty hasn’t seen a new A.I. system in a very long time.”
 
Treyarch also reworked its graphics engine for this release to include deferred render and new lighting and effects systems. “I wanted to bring back just those insane battles that only Call of Duty could do,” Lamia says. “There is so much stuff going on that we simply could not render all of that at that quality at 60 frames per second. You just can’t do that unless you do an overhaul of that whole system.”
 
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Outside of the narrative, designing a campaign that is fun for solo players all the way up to groups of four led the team to think about the spacing in the campaign’s missions. This spatial design approach not only makes sure there is enough room for players, but also that players can approach objectives in certain areas in different ways. Along with this idea came a full reworking of the series’ A.I. – a venture that goes hand-in-hand with the more open level design.
 
“There’s no way you’re going to experience everything in that area unless you do multiple playthroughs,” Lamia says. “In the games that we’ve made in the past, you could scour every inch of whatever we put in there because it was more of a linear path development. This time, we don’t even know what you’re coming in with. The designers have put different things in the world and different things that you have to fight against that you could just approach it completely differently.”
 
For the first time since he’s been working on the franchise, Blundell noticed that playtesters were having different experiences playing the same area of the campaign. “That wouldn’t normally happen in a Call of Duty campaign,” he says. “We were handing it out in a very predictable way and maybe there’s that moment where I got the kill and I didn’t die, but now there’s things happening in organic ways where […] these kinds of stories start to be told of how the A.I. was moving, how the players were moving and supporting each other, and what they’re taking in and then those combinations change the experience.”
 
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The added year of development played an instrumental role in making sure these changes were integrated properly into the core Call of Duty gameplay. “In the two-year development cycles, the kinds of risks we’re taking right now, we wouldn’t be able to do with just two years because it needs so much iteration,” Bunting says. “[We iterated on the first set of multiplayer maps for] a year. That’s three maps we were working on and each one was constructed in a different way so that we could learn how the different map shapes and the different ways that you pace combat felt differently with the different moving mechanics as they came in.”
 
Even the added personality-driven Specialists, which the team admits were inspired at least in part by MOBAs, were a direct result of Treyarch having extra time to fully develop the idea of less generic soldiers with unique abilities and weaponry. “Before there was the Pick 10 in Black Ops II, we were going down the path of starting to do character archetypes, which we had dabbled in with every single game before that,” Bunting says. “This time, having the three-year cycle was a place and time where we actually had the time to flesh that out.”
 
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Whether you’re talking campaign or multiplayer, the experience of Black Ops III appears to have greatly benefitted from the extra year. Treyarch is also promising big additions with the upcoming reveal of the zombies component that it popularized within the series. With so many new mechanics and ideas implemented in ways that deliver a Call of Duty feeling, Black Ops III is shaping up to be an ambitious take on the formula fans know.