David Vonderhaar, game design director on Call of Duty: Black Ops II has explained how he believes the multiplayer changes made to the massively popular online shooter will bring more people into matches, and encourage them to work as teams.
Whereas previous Call of Duty games favoured fast, brutal headshot deathmatch gameplay, Black Ops II has reworked the existing system of streaks and perks to suit a more e-sports style of play and reward players for more than just constant slaughter.
"Grabbing flags and capping them can give you score," Vonderhaar has told Eurogamer by way of example. "And then you can get a guy who maybe can't necessarily go on a big kill streak invested in the system and give him some rewards. Why doesn't he deserve rewards? He probably deserves them more than some guy just standing off somewhere just generating kills, and that's all he's doing."
"I think players are going to start caring about winning and losing again, and are going to go out of their way to work together," he added. "That to me is what I found now we're coming into the home stretch. All these places in the game where we subconsciously did that: the League Play feature does it. Multi-team does the same thing. I just think this can be a team game again."
Our Multiplayer Preview reveals a little bit more about all this. Call of Duty: Black Ops II will take aim at last year's sales records from November 13th, for Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and PC.