(adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({}); The Call of Duty franchise has made its name on intense player-vs-player experiences and David Vonderhaar–the design director for Call of Duty: Black Ops–bleeds multiplayer. He's the man in charge of making Black Ops' online competitive modes insanely addictive and challenging yet welcoming, too. It's a tough balance to strike and–in a roundtable discussion following the reveal of the new COD's multiplayer details–Vonderhaar spoke on how he and the team at Treyarch are trying to mold their multiplayer experience.

The introduction of an in-game economy is a huge change for the series. How do you balance the principles behind that and those prestiges and the leveling up from other Call of Duty games. Is there going to be any kind of interoperability between the different systems? In terms of leveling up and in-game money.

Yeah, there's interoperability right off the bat. In fact, it's part of the design. So let me go into a little bit of detail about how it works. Is that cool?

Yeah.

So, you still unlock features by level. You still have to rank up. You can't not rank up because you won't get any features. The difference is, when you, say you get to–this is a hypothetical–level 10. You unlock killstreaks. At that point, you unlock all killstreaks. But, then, you have to buy whichever ones that you want. The same is true of perks for the most part. And the same is true of any of the personalization stuff, for sure. Emblems, gun camos and all these things.

So, you're still leveling to get the unlocks, and then you can get in there and buy whatever you want. This is really a non-issue because when you're tuning the game, you don't tune based on the levels that anybody is at. You tune the game as though anybody can have anything at any point in time. So it doesn't really matter in any significant fashion that you have some guys at level 20 and some at level 32.

(More on Techland: Hands-On With Call of Duty: Black Ops Multiplayer)

At the end of the day, when you're balancing the game, everything needs to work, because at any point in time, the matchmaking lets anybody play together. So, anybody can have anything. So it doesn't matter. This way, it feels great to be able to say, "Hey, look, buy what you want. Do what you want." Some people know what they want, and some people don't know what they want. Some people will spend money trying to figure out what they like, others are going to know exactly what to go for.


I would add more but there's 5 pages of interview!

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