The Call of Duty franchise has made its name on intense player-vs-player experiences and David Vonderhaar–the design director for Call of Duty: Black Ops–bleeds multiplayer. He’s the man in charge of making Black Ops‘ online competitive modes insanely addictive and challenging yet welcoming, too. It’s a tough balance to strike and–in a roundtable discussion following the reveal of the new COD’s multiplayer details–Vonderhaar spoke on how he and the team at Treyarch are trying to mold their multiplayer experience.
The introduction of an in-game economy is a huge change for the series. How do you balance the principles behind that and those prestiges and the leveling up from other Call of Duty games. Is there going to be any kind of interoperability between the different systems? In terms of leveling up and in-game money.
Yeah, there’s interoperability right off the bat. In fact, it’s part of the design. So let me go into a little bit of detail about how it works. Is that cool?
Yeah.
So, you still unlock features by level. You still have to rank up. You can’t not rank up because you won’t get any features. The difference is, when you, say you get to–this is a hypothetical–level 10. You unlock killstreaks. At that point, you unlock all killstreaks. But, then, you have to buy whichever ones that you want. The same is true of perks for the most part. And the same is true of any of the personalization stuff, for sure. Emblems, gun camos and all these things.
So, you’re still leveling to get the unlocks, and then you can get in there and buy whatever you want. This is really a non-issue because when you’re tuning the game, you don’t tune based on the levels that anybody is at. You tune the game as though anybody can have anything at any point in time. So it doesn’t really matter in any significant fashion that you have some guys at level 20 and some at level 32.
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At the end of the day, when you’re balancing the game, everything needs to work, because at any point in time, the matchmaking lets anybody play together. So, anybody can have anything. So it doesn’t matter. This way, it feels great to be able to say, “Hey, look, buy what you want. Do what you want.” Some people know what they want, and some people don’t know what they want. Some people will spend money trying to figure out what they like, others are going to know exactly what to go for.
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Will the leveling and money-earning go hand-in-hand?
There’s a leveling bonus. So as you level up, you’ll get money. You can obviously complete contracts or you can Wager Match that. Leveling still has a pretty big role to play because when you go up in rank, guys who are ranked higher get paid more than guys who are ranked less. It makes sense. Just like life. [group laughter] Me, I make a lot of money, and John (Rafacz, Activision PR) makes none. [more laughter]
John: That is true.
It’s not true at all.
John: Look at these pants. [laughs]
You guys have talked about how the single-player game is going to move the character throughout various decades and all over the world. Is there any way you can incorporate the globe-trotting aspect and the moving through different time periods into multiplayer? Is there a way you can reflect that in the maps and in the assets in the world?
Yeah. They’re indirectly reflected inside multiplayer. But multiplayer is the complete toolbox. We put all those mechanics up and we put them all together at one time, and we give you all of it at once. Whereas when you’re playing the campaign, you’re going through a more structured experience. And it’s intentionally part of the design. Whereas, multiplayer is far more sandbox than that, or like, and killstreaks, and contracts, and perks, and create-a-class, and…and we’re putting it all in front of you because it’s really fun to see what players do with all of those things at once and together.
That’s what makes multiplayer, multiplayer. Single-player campaign segments that game into something a lot smaller and simpler, and gets away from sort of the spirit of multiplayer. That spirit puts all of these tools at players’ disposal, working together, and that’s really what makes it fun. It’s those scenarios where you have a gunship, I have a surface-to-air missile turret.
As far as the Theater Mode, do you have to tag a match to be recorded before you start it? Or is every online match being recorded?
Yes, great question. Here’s how that works. So, every game that you play, is saved in what we call my recent games. So you can go back, there’s a to-be-determined specific amount of time that we keep recent games. It won’t be something that you played 10 years ago.
But if you played it pretty recently, it will be there. And then you can take that game and you can save it to your file share, where it’s saved forever. Because at that point it’s your own kind of online personal hard drive thing.
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So, once you save it over there, so, when you get done with the game, the after action report will come up, you can head over, take the recent games, save it to your clip. Save it to your file share, excuse me, it was a really good game. Yeah. They’re all there. The worlds largest hard drives. When they’re in your file share, anybody on your friend’s list can come view them. Take them. Watch them. And save them to their file share if they want. They can edit, too. If you have the raw game in your file share, then they can take it and make their own version of the clip.
That’s very open-source in a way…
Yeah. Here’s how we think about it. A game is actually considered a film. A film is completely raw. It’s the entire game. You can watch it from anyone’s view. In first person. In third person. In free camera. You can change to any player at any point in time.
So you can see the game from any perspective, at any point. It’s insane actually. We can watch the whole game, and once you start editing those things, and you publish it as a clip, then people who watch your clip, see the way you made it.
So the film is the raw thing, that’s the game. The clip is something that you edited together. And when people watch your clip, they’re watching what you wanted them to see. That’s the distinction between a film and a clip.
There’s a lot of Call of Duty fans. There’s a lot of people playing the game. They are very different people. They like different things. We need to make sure that this game is broad, and we got this stuff. And then they’ll find each other and they can have fun. It sucks to think that there are people who would play the game and not be able to have fun with it. So we want to find ways for those people to have fun.
You talk about people playing and not being able to have fun and it seems like the Combat Training is trying to account for that. Can you talk a little bit about the practice dummies and the “Larry” AI and how that came about? And what specifically were you aiming for in terms of making it human-like?
Well, the first battle we had to fight was getting him to aim normally. Players have delay in their behavior. You might spot somebody in the corner of your eye, but you’re not a robot. You don’t go bam! and snap to the guy. And then bam! with your ADS, and then bam!, shooting him through the wall because you know exactly where he is.
So it was a lot of work. This thing was not much more than a development tool. He was quite literally…Larry was nothing. He was just a guy who stood there. And when you hit him he’d be like, you did 10 points of damage. You did 20 points of damage.
And we were using it as a gun-tuning tool. But it became really important to get Larry to move, and then get Larry to aim naturally, and to track well, and then it just got out of control. It started as this very simple thing and then pretty soon he’s stealing your care package crates. So he’s a practice dummy. He’s meant to help new players. He won’t solve world hunger.
Do you feed like player data into it? Are you familiar with the Super Guide and the Cosmic Guide in recent Super Mario games from Nintendo.
No.
They kind of walk you through difficult parts of the game. And what you’re actually seeing is a developer playthrough that’s been recorded and slotted into that certain game. So, are you gathering the data? Like, OK, this is how players’ behave. Are you data-mining multiplayer match-ups all throughout the infrastructure? Where are you pulling that from?
That’s way more complex than the practice dummy is. The stuff you’re talking about, I would need to get some graph paper to chart that. [laughs] I would need a whiteboard, for sure. We had the dogs in World at War and the dogs are back in this game too. And the dogs have path node data that directs them as to where to go. Larry’s built similarly. So basically, Larry is saying randomly, “I’m going to pick a spot somewhere out there and I’m going to path towards it.” And then, depending on the difficulty of the Larry, he’s got this cone of sight and he can decide whether to engage you or not. So there’s all these sort of tuneables that go into that. How far he has to go. If his gun’s a shotgun, he needs to close the gap. It’s simple math. It’s not as involved as trying to learn what other players do and emulate.
It’s just smart programming, smart rule management. He has a rule manager. All he has to do is let you pwn him so you’re satisfied, and you’re learning, and you’re getting better, and you’re practicing, and you’re having fun, and then he’s been successful.
People always complain about campers in FPS multiplayer. Is that type of behavior possible to address?
So, did we get rid of campers? Is that the question? In the map design? Well, you have to be the judge. Here’s what I say: There are new tools to combat camping, I think is the better way of thinking about it. I don’t know if you can ever solve the camping issue by map design alone. That’s what the motion sensor’s for. That’s what the jammers are for. That’s what the RCXD is for, hunting down campers, in a way.
But the maps are fairly clean. There’s certainly some maps have more hiding spots than others. Some people feel this is a significant issue. But remember, we also changed the killstreaks too. So you can’t sit around and camp out for killstreaks either. So you have to solve the camping problem with lots of things, not just map design alone. In some maps, there’s no place to hide. And in other maps, there’s plenty of places to hide, and you need variety in maps.
The jungle maps, they’re a little more open. The urban maps have a little less by way of places to hide. But hiding is actually part of the game too. That’s how you defend objectives. So you have to have balance. You can’t have a purely transparent, “I can see everything all the time” locale, or the maps will be really stale, and they’d all look the same.
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.
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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.
I know you’re kidding but, for a guy with your perspective, if people feel like “multiplayer, whatevs…” that’s got to sting. With COD specifically as a franchise, I think people buy it more for multiplayer than for single-player. Still, other designers who make other kinds of game experiences feel endangered by the encroachment of multiplayer modes.
Here’s the beautiful thing about the games industry. There’s lots of different games for lots of different people and there’s lots of people who play games. So maybe you want to play Farmville. That’s the kind of thing you’re into. That’s cool. You’re playing games. So that makes you awesome right away. Because you’re a gamer. Even if it’s Farmville. If we can take some Farmville players and make them Call of Duty multiplayers gamer, good for us. Different strokes for different folks, right?
There’s nothing so de-incentivizing than jumping in the multiplayer game, playing for a bit and like you last five seconds. And then it happens over and over again.
Right. That’s not very satisfying. I know. I go online. There’s some people out there who think it’s fun to abuse you. I get that. My first reaction is to abuse them back by killing them over and over again.
But the real truth there is, I think that the experience of multiplayer can be shared with a broader range of people who are not necessarily intrinsically comfortable with that kind of sometimes hostile environment. However, that’s what Combat Training is for. That’s what private parties are for. There are ways and tools to get around those things. The thing that’s hard is that not everybody knows about them. And what we have to do as designers and developers and gamers and journalists is to go out and make sure that these people know that there is a way. That their criticism of the game, there’s a way to deal with their criticism.
There is a solution to those problems. If you’re getting raped repeatedly online, that there is a way to come back and take care of this. There’s a way to come back and practice up. There’s a way to play private matches with your friends who will help you to become better players. We have solutions to these problems.
According to our friends in Activision marketing and research, 30 to 40 percent of the people who play single-player never play multiplayer. Now I’m sure there’s an equal number of people who play multiplayer who never play single-player. But, I don’t care about that today. So, if I could advocate for multiplayer, I’d say to these people, “Hey, you can come and try this out, and let us know why this isn’t working for you, and then give us an opportunity to tell you what you need to do to make this awesome for you.”