Call of Duty: Black Ops - Cold War comes with cross-gen, cross-platform play on November 13th (2023)

Call of Duty: Black Ops – Guerra Friawill be released on November 13th for PC, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One. But the big title of this yearactivityIt will be "cross-generational," meaning players will be able to play multiplayer on current-gen consoles and with next-gen players on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X when those consoles launch.

Like last year's Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, Cold War will be cross-platform, allowing players to team up with friends in multiplayer on PlayStation, Xbox and PC. And they'll be able to go head-to-head on current and next-gen machines in multiplayer and in Warzone, Activision's hit Call of Duty battle royale.

Black Ops: Cold War is about deniable covert operations during the Cold War, the Vietnam War and the Reagan presidency which takes place in the second half of the 20th century. I like it because it goes back to turbulent times and tries to reinterpret the meaning of that story through the lens of decades of available research. It seems that a few decades from now, video games will be looking to 2020 to understand what matters to future generations.

This is one of four stories surrounding the reveal of Call of Duty: Black Ops - Cold War. See our coverage of,playing style, e likeWarzone/Zombiespublish. Treyarch and Raven Software studios unveiled the new game to the public today in Warzone.

Black Ops: Cold War

This is a direct sequel to Call of Duty: Black Ops. This 2010 Treyarch game is about a conspiracy and the shadow war waged by the superpowers in the 1960s. The other Black Ops games jump forward in time.

"With the release of Call of Duty: Black Ops in 2010, Treyarch created a dark world of deniable covert ops," co-studio head Dan Bunting said at a press conference. "It wasn't plucked from the headlines. It was about reading between the lines, conspiracy theories, propaganda, disinformation and taking action.”

Call of Duty: Black Ops - The Cold War Story takes place in 1981, during the presidency of Ronald Reagan, a character who appears in the films. Reagan discovers this in a top-secret briefingPerseus, a Soviet spy based on an actual historical conspiracy, is back as a threat. The President specifically authorizes a covert operation or covert mission to pursue Perseus. It's shocking to see Reagan in a video game, but the animated version of him looks really good and the dialogue captures the essence of Reagan.

If you know your background, Reagan got in trouble for allegedly trading arms for hostages, selling arms to Iran to free hostages in Lebanon, and then turning around and using the money to illegally fund the Contras in Nicaragua. OIran-Contra affairIt's a disgrace to the Reagan presidency, and here we have Reagan explicitly authorizing a deniable covert operation. Reagan says "plausible denial" is the backbone of the enterprise, noting that the entire free world depends on a few people who can get things done in secret.

The mission falls on Russ Adler, a CIA agent and Vietnam veteran. Adler is part spy, part special ops soldier. So combat will involve both stealth and the action that inevitably follows if sneak fails and all hell breaks loose. As eagles and other characters, the player will see locations such as the White House, the KGB headquarters in Moscow, the jungle and rice fields of Vietnam, Latin America, Turkey and Germany.

The original Black Ops was brainwashed, betrayed and something you'd expect to see in a Bourne Identity movie or a Far Cry game rather than a Call of Duty title. If it's like Black Ops, the sequel will be disturbing and mess with your mind, leaving you wondering what's real. You see how characters can get paranoid looking for the elusive Perseus.

Even though the game is set decades ago, the developers made sure that the player has some modern options. You can play as man or woman. You can also classify your character as gender neutral, where the character's gender is "classified". This is a first for a Call of Duty game.

Activision's juggling act

The announcement comes at the end of the year for a Call of Duty title. The game comes from Raven Software and Treyarch, on a hiatus from Activision's usual three-year Call of Duty studio cycle. Traditionally, every major studio makes a game every three years, with Treyarch, Sledgehammer Games, and Infinity Ward leading the way. Other Activision-owned studios like Raven and Beenox often offer support.

But Sledgehammer went off schedule and had oneChange of leadership in 2018, so this year Raven took the lead with Treyarch, the studio for Black Ops games. If things seem to be heating up, it's probably no coincidence due to the schedule disruption. Treyarch himself last released a game two years ago, Call of Duty: Black Ops 4, which had a battle royale mode called Blackout and no single player campaign.

Also, teams have had to quit Black Ops: Cold War and work in self-isolation during the pandemic. This made tasks like voice acting and motion capture particularly difficult. The task becomes even more difficult when you start development for next-gen consoles.

"Every time you have a shorter development cycle, it's a different challenge," Bunting said. “From a campaign perspective, [Raven] had a really passionate take on it. Her passion was contagious. It was like a love letter to Black Ops I. It really convinced us that this was the right partnership. And in the shorter term, if we were to work with someone like that, we saw that we could join forces to do this. We have done a lot to develop next-generation technology. That sealed the deal. It was too important not to do.

Happy,Activision Blizzard, the parent company of Activision and its studio Treyarch, was not in dire financial straits. New and returning players are flocking to games like Call of Duty: Warzone during the pandemic. And Activision had ample resources from the teams at Treyarch, Raven Software, and Beenox to complete the job in two years instead of the usual three. Last year's Call of Duty: Modern Warfare put the series back on track with record sales. Over 75 million people have downloaded Warzone, and many of them have upgraded to the full Modern Warfare game.

Black Ops: Cold War's roots began when Sledgehammer and Raven Software couldn't agree on the direction of their project. But Treyarch and Raven came up with a plan B, which became this game. It will be a hat trick if players don't realize that this was a project that was already struggling and could have gone haywire.

Perseus is real, right?

Raven proposed a direct sequel to Black Ops, with a story built on top of thatPerseus, who allegedly broke into the security of the lab in Los Alamos, New Mexico (the same place where the secrets of the US atomic bomb were stolen). While three spies were captured, as far as we know, a fourth was never found. This is supposedly Perseus. Some of the information about this spy had been declassified in the past four or five years, said the campaign's lead writer, Murray Kraft. If you want to delve into the internet backstory of Perseus, this is one giant rabbit hole.

"In researching this game, I was shocked that some of the things I learned actually happened," Kraft said.

Evidence of the existence of a spy came from the KGB files opened in the 1990s after the collapse of the Soviet Union. But whether Perseus ever existed is a valid question. It seems that the biography of the real Perseus, at least what is known about this spy, differs from the details Activision provides about the plot of Black Ops: Cold War.

Raven's creative director, Dan Vondrak, said: "We looked at real documents, we spoke to real people who were in high positions at the time. And it's like the conspiracy theories that you think are really crazy have more truth than you realize."

The Call of Duty teaser video begins with an actual Soviet KGB defector: Yuri Bezmenov, who fled to the West in 1970. It describes a slow process of undermining hostile governments through "active measures" over decades. It's about supporting a Big Brother government in the US in times of crisis, suppressing protests, weakening the economy, demoralizing and destabilizing.

"Raven shared a humor video they produced, along with a campaign prototype that established what the 1980s Cold War was like," Bunting said. "It was a concept that impressed everyone who saw it. It was a really good opportunity.”

Vondrak said Raven has worked on every Call of Duty game over the past decade and a variety of other games over the past 30 years.

“The Cold War of the 1980s really gave us everything we needed to create a narrative with twists and turns and build a campaign with a blend of high-quality action and covert ops that we knew to be uniquely Black Ops would,” said Vondrak.

David Goyer, an Oscar-winning Hollywood screenwriter behind itThe dark knightand the original Black Ops, worked on the story with Treyarch collaborators like Murray Kraft, the senior campaign writer. It brings back characters from the original Black Ops such as Sergeant Frank Woods, CIA Agent Alex Mason, and CIA Agent Jason Hudson. And it adds new characters like Lazar Azoulay (Damon Dayoub), Helen Park (Lily Cowles), Lawrence Sims (Reggie Waters), and Adler (Bruce Thomas). He has a "dark vibe" that always dominates a room. He also has some deep scars on his face.

As Adler sits in the room and talks about Perseus, you can see him gnawing at him. Perseus, described as a Russian bogeyman, is someone who escaped Adler's grasp and that was a major embarrassment for the CIA. After 13 years of silence, Perseus has reappeared, and that means something big is about to happen.

"Adler is the guy who gets hired for the toughest jobs," Craft said. "We jokingly referred to him internally as 'America's Monster.'"

And because Adler is mysterious, some of his colleagues question his motivations. is he faithful Can you trust him? What we seem to have is a worldwide hunt for Perseus, someone who may or may not exist. Add to that the one-step psychedelic drug episode set in Vietnam, and you have reason to wonder if this is all real or not. Adler must remember something critical about the Vietnam mission that could be the key to Perseus' capture.

Stealth oder Action?

Players can create a Cold War campaign character with all sorts of options: skin color, gender, birthplace, and military background. The idea was to make sure the player could be who they want to be, Vondrak said. The player can also set a psychological profile, such as whether the character is unstable or has violent tendencies.

I saw some levels from different parts of Black Ops: Cold War that felt like typical Call of Duty shootouts. As the player fired at the enemy, the weapon's performance looked amazing as the player defeated an enemy with exactly the number of bullets he needed. You can spot a Call of Duty game at a glance, and this one was no different. Combat feels solid, even if the era weapons aren't quite as good as Modern Warfare weapons.

The game also has a variety of mission options. Some are optional side quests that unlock important evidence about the conspiracy, while others are part of the main narrative. The timeline goes back and forth between the 1980s and 1960s, with more than one mission set in the Vietnam War. Depending on the choices you make, you can experience multiple endings. It helps the player feel like they can shape the ending and that past choices matter, Vondrak said. Most Call of Duty games don't offer that much stealth.

A mission takes you to Vietnam in 1968 when Perseus tries to steal an American nuclear bomb from an American base. You can play it in different ways, resulting in different endings.

Filled with music from the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, Cold War draws inspiration from films such asThree Days of the Condor,the french connection,fire fox, and even modern works likeThe piadistand the HBO television seriesChernobyl, said Ryan Butts, lead artist at Raven Software. Frank Woods, a soldier from the first Black Ops who returns in this sequel, can serve as the player's soldier in battle scenes while Adler would be in disguise. But in many cases, the lines between their roles are blurred.

"We knew the player would spend as much time in disguise as with the louder, more combat-heavy characters," Butts said.

State-of-the-art visualizations

On next-gen consoles, the game will run at 4K resolution with a 120Hz refresh rate. Cold War will use haptic controllers. Solid State Drives (SSDs) with flash storage on new consoles will have faster load times, meaning loading screens will disappear, with seamless transitions between cinematics and gameplay.

"We want to make sure the framerate is responsive and that it feels like there's nothing on the technical side stopping you from having fun," Bunting said.

The lighting uses global illumination. This means lighting and shadows are accurate, and rays of light bounce off a scene realistically. You'll see the effects of this in things like Woods' pickup (fictional brand Bannerocks), which has a run-down look that seems to be from another era. You'll see duct tape, cracked vinyl, and a CB radio inside.

"With the power of next-gen systems, we will be able to add even more detail and put even more love into everything we create," said Katie Sabin, Vehicle Artist at Raven Software.

Raven's lighting director Alberto Noti said the team is striving for more photorealism than ever before. It captured footage of assets from the 1980s and leveraged the capabilities of next-gen consoles to display the footage with HDR, 4K, and a wide color gamut. The Soviet world was gray, but the team added pink, purple, red, and other primary colors to change the look in different scenes. The goal was to create a 1980s look in places like an arcade or a bar.

Was Noti blowing smoke? I didn't know because I was watching a video presentation and couldn't see the game in the same room as the developers. But Call of Duty has never been a disappointment with its graphics.

The game will also have enhanced 3D audio, making it easier to figure out where the sound is coming from in a 3D environment, said Treyarch's David Vonderhaar. That means advances in audio technology are harnessed for next-gen consoles.

"We couldn't be happier with how this new next-gen adventure is expanding the universe," said Bunting.

I would love to play and see more of the game soon. This one looks like it could make a lot of Black Ops fans happy.

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