Call of 3D
Treyarch's senior manager speaks out.
So, boom! Activision opens its secret payload to deliver a special Christmas tech megaton - Call Of Duty: Black Ops will hit in proper, stereoscopic 3D. That was the news being blasted out as I sat in a swish New York hotel last week, expensive electrical glasses perched on nose. Expectations were high and for the most part, Activision didn't disappoint.
Call Of Duty in 3D is pretty terrific. Everything is pulled into tighter focus. Your gunsights (even better: crossbow sights) are front and centre in the foreground, alongside your radar and objective text, or arrow if you're heading in the wrong direction.
Everything else exists in varying levels of background depth which all combine to create a compelling sense of gameplay depth. It's affecting and subtle, but it has to be - otherwise you'll be enjoying a grinding headache within minutes.
It's no game changer like HD was for television broadcast, but I came away impressed and downhearted. Why downhearted? Because I always told myself that 3D was for later. A vanity purchase for next year when I didn't have expenses more pressing, like a holiday or a new car.
Having sat through two missions and Combat Training, I really, really wanted to play through Black Ops in 3D. This is going to be the only way to experience the biggest game of 2010. Curse you for that, Activision.
But there was an interview to be done, one with lovely, cuddly favourite uncle-type Jay Puryear. He's the senior manager at Treyarch, and here's what he had to say.
Well, it wasn't even [Treyarch's] idea. It was some very smart guys at Activision – engineering folks – who thought they could pull it off.
So we said, by all means investigate it, go ahead and try to get the tech to work for both systems. But know that if it's not up to par, or at least up to our expectations, and it doesn't add something to the experience, it's not going to make it into the box.
Then we had the opportunity to see where they were at and we said, "Wow! This is fantastic! Let's go full steam ahead!"
The product that you see here in 3D is the same product that's shipping in 2D. So we didn't add anything specifically for 3D, this tech is working with the existing title. And 3D is supported across all the different game modes: so multiplayer, single-player campaign and zombies.
Yes. And zombies. All three.
I don't know how much we want to get into the specifics of how we're doing it. But we've been enabled to figure out a way to do a left and a right screen, to do side-by-side 3D, so we're rendering two different fields.
In many instances we are hitting 60FPS, in some cases we're not, but the key to it all is making sure that in your field of view, it feels natural. So as you play it, you don't feel eye fatigue.
That's the part we really tried to make sure was right. There are no options to set up 3D, you're not going to change the parallax. There is an option where you can go from 3D to 2D and vice versa. It is running at 720p and because we're able to find that sweet spot so you don't get that eye fatigue that some players receive in 3D.
We've had guys at the studio who have gone though the single-player campaign multiple times in 3D and really not even notice it. You just forget about it. You can also turn the cross-hair on and off as well, if that is a bother for some people.
We always wanted to look at the technology. We always try to push the envelope and with all the possibilities that the 3D TV offers now, it was more a question of, "Can we do it"?
The second step was, will it work for Call of Duty? Is it something we feel will add to the experience? And we felt that the 3D really gives you this immersive nature that's a little bit different to the normal 2D experience. Because of that, we felt that it added value to the title. As long as it was up to our standards for what we wanted, then it was going to go in.
So if you asked me a few months ago if it was going to make it... It was a fifty-fifty kind of thing, we just didn't know. And so when we saw the demo, and when we saw that crossbow for the first time, we were like, OK, how do we make this happen?
Potentially. I think really once we saw it working, we really wanted to make sure, how can we get it in for 9th November?