This year’s installment of Call of Duty brings some major changes to the series, along with plenty of polish and smaller changes to familiar features.
Howerer, if you’re new to the franchise, read over our basic training material. If you’re a vet, you can skip right to our detailed weapon breakdowns and gear information.
What’s New
Specialists
In multiplayer matches, you now choose to play as one of nine specialists, unique characters, each with their own personalities, histories, and style.
Each of the nine specialists has a unique weapon and ability that you can use in combat. Typically one is more offensive, the other focused on utility or defense.
Specialist powers charge up slowly over time, and more quickly if you score kills. Unlike Scorestreaks, Specialist power progress is not lost on death, so eventually everyone has access to their power, regardless of how well they are performing in a match.
As a result of this, expect a little extra mayhem in every game—you’re going to see the classic Black Ops weapons spinning up to unleash havoc, and there are many other powerful abilities to discover.
Guns Up Mobility
A major new feature and focus for Black Ops III is player mobility. Specifically, the ability to traverse a map quickly and efficiently, always keeping your weapon up and ready to fire in an instant.
Your new specialist characters are also powerfully augmented future soldiers, capable of performing jetpack assisted double jumps, power slides, and wall runs.
Map Design
To accommodate the new mobility, maps have quite a few features specifically designed to allow you to jump over, wall run along, mantle across, or swim beneath them.
Pay careful attention to areas where there is accessible high ground—it can be reached in an instant with a quick jump and mantle, and controlling it is often key to locking down the nearby combat zone.
Also keep an eye out for shortcuts that can be traversed only with a combination of careful thrust jumps and wall runs—many maps have back doors that enable ambushes if used well.
Gunsmith and Paintshop
You can extensively customize your weapons in Black Ops III.
The Gunsmith and Paintshop work together to allow you to create a fully customized weapon that perfectly suits your tastes.
The Gunsmith lets you put up to five attachments on a weapon, as well as a single optic. Doing so consumes your entire Pick 10 point reserve, but if you want a completely blinged out gun, there you go.
Attachments themselves can be customized visually. Every attachment on every gun in the game has alternate visuals that you can cycle through, allowing you to modify the basic appearance of your weapon.
The Paintshop allows for personalized visual customization. You can apply built-in camo schemes, or completely customize your weapon with hand-made colored decals. There’s enough flexibility and power here for artistically inclined players to create some pretty impressive artwork.
eSports Features
A major focus for Black Ops III, the Arena playlist (ranked matches in multiplayer) and the CodCaster feature (powerful spectating tools for announcers) both help support competitive play.
On top of that, there are rules in place to allow for Specialist Drafts (letting teams ban, protect, and pick specialist powers), as well as settings to disable any weapons, attachments, gear, perks, specialists—essentially every part of the multiplayer game can be hand customized in private matches.
Returning Veterans
Unlocks
Unlocking specialists, weapons, gear, perks, and streaks are all handled with unlock tokens, awarded as you gain levels in multiplayer. This system works just like it did in Black Ops II.
Items are gated by level, so you can’t unlock any item immediately, but as you progress, your options increase, and you can choose which items are most important to your personal loadout.
Gun Leveling
Attachments on your weapons unlock as you level the specific gun in question. Just like your personal player level, your weapons also have a level, and using them in battle increases your available attachment options.
Pick 10
Unchanged from Black Ops II, Pick 10 has received one small tweak—you can now take the Primary Gunfighter perk up to three times, allowing you to create customized weapons with five attachments!
