I think our visuals - we’re getting to a point now where, when we do the Titanic, I love this thing. That’s only possible when you have enough staff to do that kind of stuff. We’ve been able to expand it more, give all those personalization features and customizable features. Because of the success of Zombies up to this point, we have a bigger team. I’m also very happy about the mechanical level. We’ve had some great ideas over the years, and to be able to start a new story and put those into it makes me very happy. I know that’s a cop-out, but I’m happy with our new Chaos story. It’s tough, because I’m really happy with every single element. GamesBeat: What do you think you’re most proud of, now that this Zombies is nearly finished?īlundell: I have to be honest.
Everyone can get on the ride at the beginning and get going again. People would say, “I love this Zombies thing, but lord knows what it’s talking about now.” The Chaos story is going to start off nice and slow. But it’s also an opportunity in Black Ops IV to start the new Chaos story, start at a base level, and get more people in. Knowing what’s going on - the Aether story, 10 years worth of that, is mind-bogglingly complicated. Zombies became this thing where to have played deeper became a badge of honor. A lot of people don’t go all the way through to the end of a campaign. As we became more and more hand-holdy - you know, if you stop playing by level three you miss out on the other 10 levels of content we made for you. As the game industry has become more and more hand-holdy in terms of - I can say this as a campaign guy. GamesBeat: Do you have any worry that with Zombies, people might never finish the story?īlundell: Yeah, yeah. This is what I did and what happened after.” It’s the combination of those ideas – the traditional story element and then your story coming together – that we’ve been interested in and continue to be interested in. Not only do we have the storytelling of our world and our characters, we now have three modes where emergent storytelling is you speaking to your friend over the water cooler and saying, “This is what happened last night. The specialists are the focus for our multiplayer and Blackout as well, and combat missions give you even more story for each of the characters.Įven though we don’t have a traditional campaign, I think we’re doing more storytelling here than we have in the past. That stack of scripts stands several times higher than any script for any campaign we’ve ever produced, in terms of storytelling. I’ve been executive producer on every Black Ops campaign. My lead writer, Craig Houston, I asked him to print out all the scripts for Zombies. When we were making traditional campaigns, we were adding more co-op, and multiplayer of course is social by its very nature. Zombies has been increasing in popularity and the number of people playing it. When we started Black Ops IV - if you look at the trajectory of the games we’ve been making, we’ve been heading toward a more social game with every iteration. Do you think some of that responsibility falls on Zombies now that the game lacks single-player?īlundell: It’s interesting. GamesBeat: Some of the responsibility of the single-player game is to get people attached to characters, get people used to the story, get everyone to know what they’re playing with in multiplayer. Our understanding of history can be preserved. Not many people are walking away from the Titanic telling the story. All the situations they end up in, there’s no one with video cameras. Our understanding of world history, the Chaos story still works with that. They go and visit, visually, places in the past. The Chaos story is a bit more traditional, if you will, in terms of - there is a linear path along there.
The difference is that with the Aether story, we’ve jumped across time and space and multiple dimensions and so forth. Not only are they used to it, they demand it. From that point we can go a lot further, absolutely. When you talk about the Zombies community - if you already have a community that’s okay with the dead coming back to life, we’re starting out in a realm of fantasy. Three top investment pros open up about what it takes to get your video game funded.īlundell: Here’s the thing.