It's about how your operator moves
and weaves through your surroundings.
It's feeling the power of your weapon,
how it reacts in your hands.
It's the sound of bullets storming past you,
the rattle and bang of firing your weapon.
In Cold War, we're back to plausible,
authentic boots-on-the-ground combat.
That's allowed us to not only refine the feel of the game,
but build on all the classic foundations of Black Ops:
heads-up gameplay, automated healing,
and grounded movement.
Keeping your player experience in the front of our minds
has also inspired a fresh wave of thinking
across our Create-a-Class and Scorestreak systems,
where we're introducing features
that bring unprecedented transparency to your planning
and cinematic "wow" moments to when you're playing.
Now, innovating systems while still capturing
that signature Black Ops, super-smooth feel
is a notoriously tricky thing to get just right,
and we put everything we have into it for each game.
This is an absolute team effort,
so I brought some friends from the Combat Team
to tell you about our initiatives for this game,
and how they've resulted in Signature Combat
that feels just right.
Here's Max Porter to start us off.
We've taken lessons learned from across Black Ops
and the entire Call of Duty franchise
to land on a truly best-in-class weapon experience.
The gun is almost always right in front of you,
and must look great.
From a gun's seams down to its grime,
the level of detail in Black Ops Cold War has never been higher.
But our weapons also need to move in a realistic manner.
You'll feel it in this game,
whether you're clocking from long-range...
or firing from the hip.
When we think about a gun,
we think about its looks, the way it moves.
But a big part of a gun's personality
is the sound it makes.
It's like the bark of a dog.
We're sort of imagining all of these guns as characters.
That just adds to that level of realism
and that immersive quality that is unique to Call of Duty.
It's this multi-faceted approach to how weapons look,
animate, and sound that together defines the feel
of Cold War's signature gunfighting experience.
Here's Alvan with a debrief on some of the other
combat systems waiting for you in Cold War.
RADAR BEEPING
Let's talk about two of the most significant
and impactful features of multiplayer:
Create-a-Class and Scorestreaks.
Our goal with Create-a-Class in Cold War is to empower you
without making trade-offs.
This year, better starts with simpler.
Create-a-Class will be a slot-based system.
No longer governed by allocations
or the pick-10 system,
you'll always boast a full class of a primary, secondary,
lethal, tactical,
Field Upgrade, and a set of perks.
Field Upgrades are items placed in the world
to give your team an advantage.
You can earn them solely based on time, not score,
and they are the only type of game content
that works on a cooldown that lasts after death.
Now, Wildcards are back.
In this system, in every class,
you can pick one of four Wildcards
that let you do things like:
load your primary weapon with up to eight attachments,
carry up to six Perks,
double the number of lethals and tacticals you have,
or carry three primary Perks from any mix of categories.
Of course, a key component of Create-a-Class is the Gunsmith.
In Black Ops Cold War,
there are more optics and attachments to unlock
and configure than ever before.
Every primary weapon can be customized with 54 attachments
across eight different nodes, or attachment points,
with at least six options per attach point.
By default, you can equip five attachments,
or eight with the Gunfighter Wildcard.
For the first time,
Gunsmith will show you what equipping an attachment does
as a positive or negative percentage.
You can now build backwards, spec'ing out the perfect gun
for results you want to see in the field.
This takes the guesswork out of the system,
and helps us on our never-ending quest
to make the most balanced Call of Duty game
you've ever played.
There's one more thing I need to talk about.
First up, we've updated Scorestreaks
so that earned score is kept through death.
This change gives all players
a chance to engage with Scorestreaks,
one of the most visceral and fun experiences
across multiplayer's Signature Combat.
If you do go on a streak
and string together multiple kills before your own death,
streak score bonuses help you earn
into those higher-powered Scorestreak tiers.
To prevent Scorestreak spam,
each Scorestreak will go on a cooldown after it's used
to pace out frequency.
So, what Scorestreaks are we talking about?
Well, your favorites are back,
but we've also got a few surprises.
Scorestreaks in Cold War can be used in all the classic ways:
to aid in taking an objective,
to save your team,
to break up the pace of the game with a fun new experience.
We've also tailored strategy into the system,
as Scorestreaks can often be neutralized
with a counter-Scorestreak.
And now I'll pass it over to Sunni
to share more about our Operators
and how they move in Black Ops Cold War.
INSTRUMENTS BEEPING
Elite. Covert. Powerful.
When you play as a Cold War Operator,
you won't just step into the boots
of a highly trained, precision instrument.
Every movement has a purpose.
To increase the fidelity and feel of even small elements,
modelers, animators and concept artists
all work side-by-side,
planning for every point of contact with every gun,
every stance and position, every scenario.
Thanks to increased dynamic bone counts,
we've been able to enhance the effects of physics
and gravity on what you carry,
from the weight of your gear, like pouches and grenades,
to the way a wallet chain or rope sways as you sprint.
Your entire Operator will move more naturally than ever.
Here's four specific ways movement has improved
through cutting-edge techniques in animation
and programmatic movement.
The first is sprint take-off.
This is the feature that gives your Operator a running start.
You start with a little sprint, then it slows to normal speed.
This lets you feel the momentum
of where you're going and where you're going to end up.
We wanted to preserve the fluidity and fun
of an Operator's ability to slide.
In Black Ops Cold War, when you slide,
you start and end in a crouched position in a believable way.
This allows two player movement states
to function better as one,
all while improving gameplay and enhancing pace.
Footstep control also plays a big part
of our new movement system.
Go faster, and you'll make more noise.
Of course, we still have Ninja as a perk.
But Ninja is no longer the only way to keep quiet.
Whether or not you're crouched,
how loud you get is now directly tied to how fast you're moving.
Lastly, we have incorporated a classic jump
with a much more natural height,
which will very briefly slow you down on landing.
Our goal in all of these movement mechanics
is to ensure Operators' actions are not just authentic,
but intuitive.
When you press a button or a key,
you should always feel in control of your Operator,
and this system has been built to translate your decisions
into dynamic movement more seamlessly than ever.
The era of the game might be the '80s,
but the characters you play will move and shoot
like the world's most highly skilled Operators.
Signature Combat.
It isn't just how a gun is shot.
It's how that gun feels, how it sounds,