Call of Duty: Black Ops II Game Director Dave Anthony Discusses the Campaign

Treyarch divided its massive team into three large segments with each focusing on a critical component of the gameplay experience – campaign, multiplayer and zombies. Dave Anthony, the writer and director of the game’s campaign, worked with Hollywood actors to bring the branching storyline to life. While much of the focus of Call of Duty: Black Ops II will ultimately come from the online gameplay, most people will invest time in the campaign experience. Anthony talks about the new story in this Prima exclusive interview.

How did the setting of 2025 and the backstory of the 1980s impact the game’s storytelling?

Very significantly. The timeline was actually very carefully designed to juxtapose two Cold Wars. When you first play the game in the late 1980s, you’re actually playing as Alex Mason — the character from the first Black Ops game played by Sam Worthington, who I’m so proud of his performance. He’s just hitting it out of the park on this one. You play the game through his eyes and you see how the first Cold War was fought in those days, which is traditionally rows and rows of people on the battlefield slaughtering each other. Then we catapult you to 2025, where you’re actually playing as Alex Mason’s son, David Mason, and now you see how wars are fought in the future and it’s a really different feel to how you’re used to playing a Call of Duty game. It’s still boots on the ground, and it’s still all the mechanics that you’re familiar with, but we’re presenting so many new types of gameplay opportunity.

What’s an example of new gameplay?

We have these new types of gameplay levels called Strike Force levels, where you can actually play any character on the battlefield. You can take control of any vehicle or any drone or any piece of technology that is live and active on that battlefield. You can actually go into this thing we call the Tactical View, where you can control the whole battlefield from this God-like position where you’re looking down on the battlefield. You have control over platoons and drones and it’s a completely different way of thinking about how you play this game. But for the people who still want the core mechanics, you can play this mode completely from first person, but still have control of the entire battlefield from that view.

How has Alex Mason evolved from the last game?

People are going to be astonished when they see how Alex Mason’s character has evolved from the first game. One of the fascinating relationships for me in the game is actually the relationship between Alex Mason and his son David. When you first see them in the game, you actually see David Mason as a seven year old boy and you see how Alex Mason interacts with him, which I love because Alex Mason’s like your hero soldier. How does someone like that actually interact with a young boy? It’s out of his comfort zone a little bit – and we take that relationship and we run with it. When you see how some these things come, it’s pretty powerful stuff.

What are you most proud of when it comes to Call of Duty: Black Ops II?

One of the things I am most proud of is how the branching story element of the game turned out. It really is something unique in Call of Duty and even first person shooters I think. The way it works is that when you’re going through the story, you’re the main character who will live or die depending on the decisions you make. This isn’t stuff that all sort of happens on scene right at the end of the game. This is throughout the game as you’re playing it. There’s a villain who has his own thing going on and you have opportunities to interfere with that along the way. There’s a cold war between America and China which on strike force levels you actually get the opportunity to affect the outcome of that overall war, which then has further implications on the story.

How does this impact replay?

You have all these different things going on and it’s all handled within the story. The funny thing is that I watched two people play the finished game and they carried on a conversation about a scene and they ended up having completely different experiences. The version one guy was talking about had different alternatives in it so the game was different And that’s exactly the kind of discussion that I wanted to provoke…a real water cooler moment where you have people talking about what they did and who lived and who died. It’s pretty interesting to see their reaction.