On October 5th Activision Publishing Inc put out a press release stating that Call of Duty Black Ops would be going Stereoscopic 3d. Well this is great news as today October 5th 2010 is the PlayStation Canada Holiday Preview event at the newly renovated Sony Centre in downtown Toronto. Yes that put us among the first to see this newly announced mode for the Call of Duty franchise on the PlayStation 3.
To continue with its annual release, Call of Duty will be coming on November 9th 2010 and is being developed by Treyarch Studios. Black Ops will be available on Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and PC and will come with 3D support if you have the required hardware to take advantage of this technology. Don’t worry, if you don’t have a 3D TV simply just hop into the menu and ensure 3D is turned off.
Jay Puryear Senior Manager at Treyarch studios was on hand to provide us with a 20 minute demo featuring 2 levels from the single player campaign called WMD and some time with the Number’s chapter which is yet to be shown publicly.
WMD starts with an interactive cut scene where an SR-71 Blackbird recon airplane takes to the sky and provides its eyes for a squad of troops down below. You direct and navigate them to various checkpoints throughout the level. Upon reaching each checkpoint you switch and take control of the squad of troops and fight off the enemies.
Numbers chapter starts with an interrogation scene where glass windows get smashed and a piece of glass gets put down a throat of the villain as we seek to get information out of him since he’s working for the enemy. Since we didn’t get the information we want we might as well throw a few good punches at his jaw. Before the interrogation is over, the enemy zeros in on your location and storms the building. Our prisoner takes the lead and heads up flights of stairs to the roof top where we proceed to take big leaps and jump across buildings. Once we make it inside we find a nice stash of weapons that our prisoner has stored away for us.
We also had a chance to check out some of the combat training mode which is essentially you and up to 5 of your friends taking on 6 AI bots in a multiplayer game. Don’t worry, the bot’s difficulty setting scales just like the single player campaign; Easy, Normal, Hardened and Veteran. It teaches and allows you get a feel for COD multiplayer without going online and getting your butt kicked by those trash talking 14 year old kids. It looked really good in 3D, however, I’m not sure I want my multiplayer shooters in 3D yet as there is to much going on for me.
Enough talk about Call of Duty Black Ops and on to the 3D talk. Considering that a decision at Treyarch was made no more than 5 months ago to implement 3D to this iteration of COD is astonishing. Back when the discussions first started this idea was looked at as a nice option to have for the game, but as things progressed it became obvious to the team that 3D needed to happen. I’ve seen a lot of 3D movies lately and some of the implementations were awful and felt more like a checklist requirement the movie needed to have. Have no worries here folks, this is the first video game that support’s 3D that has made me go OMG I think I need a 3D television. The first thing I remember seeing when I turned on the 3D glasses was Jay having his character looking down the scopes of his rifle and going shit that looks crazy real. The cross hairs and debris looked they were flying my way.
Sounds sick… I was wondering how long it would take before we would get this kind of realism. I truly thought it would be longer but it really seems like 3D is here to stay and growing by leaps and bounds in a short period of time.