Speaking of maps looking the same, how far out from launch are you guys planning DLC?
How soon after launch?
Yeah.
Well, right away. Realistically. As soon as this game is over, we’ll go to work on the DLC. A lot of people need to take a little break. We’d like to take a small breather, please. If you followed World at War, we had three map packs. I’m sure we’ll have a similar number. And I am sure they’ll come as fast as we can give them to you. I’m sure that I can find some business people who are mad that they’re not already done.
(More on Techland: My Ten Hours with Halo: Reach)
Is there anything you can say about a beta announcement at this point?
The game is at its beta milestone. So it’s in beta. It’s a closed beta. So there’s a lot of people inside, the friends and family of Activision that are playing the game, as we speak, which is why the playlist on the floor has that reflection. So, there’s been no announcement about anything other than a closed internal beta. The truth about beta here is that when it’s internal, you can iterate on it a lot faster. Let’s suppose I made a beta build right now and put it up on Xbox Live. By the time that I could get it there, I would have made 10 more builds and it would be out of date. So it’s actually this really tricky thing to walk. The game is at beta, it’s in beta, and it’s being beta tested.
I want to throw a more philosophical question out there.
Oh s**t!
Sorry. They let me in. A lot of people see multiplayer as just kind of a venal collection of certain type of gamer. And they feel like it’s also a cash-in for companies like Activision who implement it in their games. How would you respond to these criticisms of the people who play multiplayer and the reasons that multiplayer winds up in games in the first place?
So, can your articulate the criticism directly?
One: it’s a space where people go not necessarily to play fair but just to act out. And two–I can only give the example recently of like say, a BioShock 2–where people felt that multiplayer was tacked on to a game where it didn’t necessarily need to be there. I’m not saying either one of those things are true about Black Ops…
How dare you, sir! [laughs]
Especially with it not being out yet.
It is just MP (multiplayer), man.
Because I feel like you’re a guy whose lifeblood is MP.
Definitely.
So how do you respond to people who feel like, “Well, I don’t want that crap anyway”?
Those people who don’t want that crap, don’t know what that crap is. I would respond to someone who doesn’t think they need MP, is they haven’t had a taste of how amazingly beautiful it is. And what we have to do as a community of MP fans, is to go out and educate those sons-of-bitches about what they’re missing out on. We’ve got to give them some ways where they can experience that safely, and we’re getting there with that. But, look, there will be certain people that never love multiplayer. F**k those people.