From the Call of Duty:Black Ops Intel Page:

The official Call of Duty: Black Ops trailer has arrived! This extended 90 second trailer is available first, exclusively on Black Ops, and is comprised entirely of in-game footage. It should set the scene we at Treyarch intend to capture this year with Black Ops.

One other little tidbit of information is that the callofduty.com domain name is now forwarding directly to callofduty.com/blackops so there is no more home page selection screen to go to the title of choice.

In the latest issue of PC Zone magazine there was a question & answer session with  Treyarch studio head Mark Lamia and he offered a pretty clear picture that Call of Duty:Black Ops will definitely be including dedicated server support.

When asked whether the popular feature would be present in Black Ops in the new issue of PC Zone, Lamia replied, “I think dedicated servers are excellent. I don’t see any reason not to see them unless… well, I just don’t see any reason not to.”

“It seems people like them and we’re excited about what we’re doing right now.”

Lamia showed his appreciation of how much dedicated servers meant to a lot of PC gamers:

“We do work very hard to reconcile the desire to manipulate and modify those dedicated servers with offering them the persistent experience and benefits that the console system provides.”

“We’re working very hard to marry those two things, so people can run dedicated servers and also participate in the communal experience the console players get to have, given they’re all on first-party servers.”

Source: www.computerandvideogames.com

Since the teaser trailer went live last week the advertising campaign pushes on with a handful of online retailers launching their pre-order options over the weekend. Amazon, BestBuy, GameStop and Walmart are already taking pre-orders for the now normal $59.99 price and I am sure plenty others will soon follow. As of now Call of Duty:Black Ops is set to release later this year on November 9th 2010.

• Call of Duty:Black Ops pre-order at Amazon
• Call of Duty:Black Ops pre-order at BestBuy
• Call of Duty:Black Ops pre-order at GameStop
• Call of Duty:Black Ops pre-order at Walmart

The first released DLC for COD:MW2 is now available in the Steam Store.

http://store.steampowered.com/app/10195/

The map pack includes five multiplayer maps named Bailout, Storm, Salvage, Overgrown and Crash. Have fun playing three new maps and two regurgitated maps from COD4.

Props to the B&S team as this is another stellar cast with a great group of guys.

The official COD:BO debut trailer is here and it definitely is a teaser as it is quite hard to tell what all is really going on. The video can also be seen on the homepage new COD:BO website at www.callofduty.com/blackops.

COMING SOON Worldwide Reveal Trailer Follow Us on Twitter and Facebook

This announcement note was also posted on the Treyarch website here.

We at Treyarch are excited to reveal our latest development – Call of Duty: Black Ops! Be sure to head over to CallOfDuty.com/blackops as more details begin to unfold! Follow @JD_2020 and @Treyarch on Twitter for the latest news & discussions regarding Black Ops.

Whether it was a mistake of launching the website just a little to soon on the Activision/Treyarch side or if it was just a little teaser to keep us excited a few more days; a new branch of the COD Headquarters went live earlier today with a somewhat functioning website. With the basic entry screen alone it does in fact confirm the name for COD 7 to be Call of Duty:Black Ops and it also confirms a release date of November 9th 2010. Be sure to check out the new website www.callofduty.com/blackops for much more information over the coming days & weeks.

More will be known after tonight after the GameTrailers TV episode 310 on SpikeTV showing the exclusive official first trailer.

According to the GameTrailers TV episode 310 promo on GameTrailers.com; they will be presenting the first official Call of Duty 7 trailer on it’s show titled GameTrailersTV on SpikeTV Friday night at 12:40AM EST (actually Saturday).

The next Call of Duty game debuts on this week’s GameTrailers TV, plus interviews with Prince of Persia star Jake Gyllenhaal and Resident Evil: Afterlife stars Milla Jovovich and Ali Larter!

This will be the first view of really anything to be seen of COD 7 since the rumors started flying quite a while ago. It should be interesting to at least get a glimpse of what is to come.

 

It appears Activision Blizzard is considering a potentially controversial new way to generate revenue. During yesterday’s quarterly conference call, CEO Bobby Kotick hinted that the Call of Duty franchise will head the way of World of Warcraft and become subscription-based.

Activision Blizzard acts as the publisher of the Call of Duty games developed alternately by Infinity Ward and Treyarch. Though the franchise’s latest installment, Modern Warfare 2, was the best-selling video game of 2009 and generated more than $1 billion in revenue according to the NPD Group, Activision Blizzard still reported a $286 million loss in its fiscal fourth quarter. The loss was due, in large part, to the bottom falling out of the Guitar Hero franchise.

Conversely, Blizzard’s World of Warcraft franchise continues to be a cash cow for Activision, raking in $15 subscription fees from a reported 11.5 million people every month.

Put the pieces together and you can understand the company’s thinking: a financial loss, an enormously popular franchise, and a proven subscription model that generates a river of revenue. Kotick described the future of Call of Duty this way:

 

If you think about the success that we’ve had in other product categories on subscription, you can get a sense of the direction that we want to take that franchise.

 

World of Call of Duty? Subscription fees on the game’s online multiplayer? Kotick had nothing else to say on the matter, though the company did confirm that the next installment in the series is due out late this year.

 

If this subscription model does actually get applied; especially on the next installment of COD by Treyarch due out later this year, it will for sure be the killer of the Call of Duty series – especially after the blow that COD:MW2 did to the “true” COD community. The WOW community is a very different group of individuals than the COD community and a subscription based model for a FPS game like COD will only rid the game of the true players and leave the kiddies and casual gamers that feed off of their mom and dads bank account left to play.

Could this be the final stab in the heart of the COD gaming community minority?

Source: http://videogames.yahoo.com/news-1389056

Well I have still been watching the COD:MW2 player counts on the Steam’s stats page every now and then but lately as I check the stats it seems that the MW2 peak is dropping little by little. Before Christmas the peak for the day was almost consecutively right around 100,000 and with gifts of MW2 for Christmas that number surged to 120,000 and even up as high as 124,682 in mid January however it seems that the numbers are on a steady decline now. Well the Battlefield BC2 BETA is out now and there seems to be a pretty big interest in that; including myself, but I there are definitely some other games affecting that total as well. Whatever the reason over the last three weeks the peak player count has steadily declined down to where it is now averaging a peak just over 110,000 this week so far so there is a decent number of people that are sick of playing MW2 already or they are defiantly shopping around for something else to get into.

Well the time is here. The game that so many put their hope in to “kill” COD:MW2 or at least give them something else to play instead of COD:MW2 or just play because they are already sick of the sub-par COD:MW2. Today marks the start of the Battlefield: Bad Company 2 public BETA and if you pre-ordered your game through a number of different websites then you should have been eligible for a public BETA key to play the game. I was a little late on getting up-to-date on all of the BETA info so I actually pre-ordered through GameStop yesterday (yes, the day of the BETA!) but surprisingly I received my BETA key late last night from GameStop and during the wait I manged to find a good torrent link to download the whopping  1.42GB installer so everything was ready for my normal half day of work on Fridays.

I got home just after noon today; grabbed some lunch and by 2:00PM I had BC2 installed and running. Wow. Totally not what I was expecting and going into a Battlefield game trying to play it like a Call of Duty game A) does not work very well, B) is not very fun and C) gets you killed A LOT. I haven’t played a Battlefield game since Battlefield 1942 and that was quite a while ago so as you can imagine I didn’t do very well first time around. Coming out of a few hours of game play tonight I found the game to be pretty decent in terms of actual fluid game play and definitely excellent in terms of graphics (although with the BETA there seems to be some minor performance issues) but it was rough. There were some frustrating times had since I have been playing COD games for nearly 7 years straight and this is a totally different game. I will need some more time and testing but the game really does look promising. Is it enough to pull me away from COD? Well that is yet to be known but I am anxious to get some more game play time in over the next few days.

Just wanted to post a quick note wishing everyone a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year! Have a safe and happy holiday break if you have one. Oh, and play plenty of COD!

I have been watching the player stats pretty closely for all the games in the COD series since a week after the COD:MW2 release and one of the first things I do when I get to work (and periodically throughout the day) is check the COD:MW2 player counts on Steam’s stats page. For the first time in 5 weeks Counter Strike:Source was back on top with 51,656 players versus Call of Duty:Modern Warfare 2 with 50,523 players at 8:49AM EST.

Now does this mean anything significant about COD:MW2 player counts? No. Not at all. But it is an interesting tidbit of information since COD:MW2 has consistently been in the top spot every single day at this time for 5 straight weeks since I have been looking at the stats. I am sure within the hour that COD:MW2 will be back on top easily. Stay tuned for more info in the near future for my COD player tracking.

Celebrating a COD:WAW 1 year anniversary and a BASHandSlash 3 year anniversary Jock Yitch and the crew has an excellent podcast with some great information in regards to Treyarch and the future of the other half of the COD development world. The host for this episode is the Treyarch Community Manager – Josh Olin (aka) JD_2020.

New NVIDIA drivers (195.62 WHQL) were released yesterday and this is a notable release because of two reasons:

One, it corrects the “buffer overflow” issue for COD:UO that I posted about back in October that occurred with the then latest release of 191.07 WHQL drivers. (From the release notes)

 

GeForce GTX 260: Call of Duty 1–the application crashes with a buffer overrun
error. [606182]

 

And two, SLI and multi-GPU support is added for COD:MW2. (From the release highlights)

 

Adds SLI and multi-GPU support for many top new gaming titles including Borderlands, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, FIFA Soccer 10, and more.

 

If you are upgrading your drivers as always I recommend using Add/Remove Programs (or Programs and Features or Programs for Windows Vista and Windows 7) to do the actual uninstall of the current drivers, a reboot of the system, then a cleaning using Driver Sweeper, then another reboot of the system and then finally the installation of the current drivers. This ensures you get a clean installation of the new drivers and there aren’t any parts left behind to muck things up.

Early Monday JD_2020 popped in the WAW Barracks and posted a quick thread about the 1.7 patch being wrapped up and released this week and today is the day!

To kind of put an end to some lingering speculation about Map Pack 4 I think this answers the question as this patch is appears to be just wrapping up some bugs hanging around comes in at only 15.8MB. I could be wrong but I would imagine that this will be the last update for WAW now that the groundbreaking Modern Warfare 2 is released and flourishing and hopefully Treyarch is working on their next COD installment. As long as it is still actually a PC game I will be quite interested!

You can get the patch here on CODV or you can head on over the callofduty.com PC Updates page in the link below and find a boatload of more places to get it.

• http://www.callofduty.com/supplies/pc-updates

So over the last two days I have been doing a serious amount of reading reviews on gaming websites, reviews from clan members, reviews & comments on the IW Forums (when they aren’t broke with MYSQL connection errors) and just generally reading any kind of material I can to get honest opinions of how this game really is.

Here is the summary of Pros and Cons that I have come up with. Now keep in mind that I have not purchased the game (and don’t plan to) nor have I played it or been present while it was being played. This is merely what I have gathered from many different sources around the web.

The PROS

• Slight upgrade in graphics quality over COD4
• Slight upgrade in audio quality over COD4
• Some objects in the environment are manipulative (eg. some destructible walls, exploding cars & barrels, breaking windows)
• Excellent character and weapons design, great level detail (even in multiplayer) great environments to tie everything in
• Decent single player campaign game play portions that helps the bad storyline
• Excellent cut scenes to break up the campaign sessions
• Spec Ops co-op mode addition that is a lot of fun and offers 23 additional levels that are different from the single player campaign
• Future DLC material will probably build upon the Spec Ops co-op mode
• A multiplayer experience that lets you easily find a game with random people and start playing with just a few clicks
• A few new perks and changes in perks like Martyrdom and Last Stand that make multiplayer a little more bearable
• Prestige mode included for those that enjoy replaying multiplayer for unlockable content

The CONS

• There are limited audio options (eg. can’t adjust levels for music, voice, sound effects)
• Single player can be completed in as little as 5 hours on regular difficulty
• Steam will manage all updates and changes to the game
• Poor single player storyline that is not very clear and is mostly told through cut scenes or AI talking during bad times (eg. during intense fire fights, chase scenes, etc.)
• The single player campaign is very heavily scripted which makes game play very predictable in some situations and requires you to play the game a very specific way to accomplish your objectives offering practically no replay ability
• There is no leaning in the game to “peek” around corners or objects
• The co-op game play is limited to only two players
• Most multiplayer games modes are limited to 6 vs 6; some are 9 vs 9
• Multiplayer generally seems to be laggy at least during some portion of any game
• Multiplayer matchmaking does not always match geographic locations correctly
• Multiplayer match making games are short due to the standard IWnet set time/score limit
• Some multiplayer game modes are locked and can only be unlocked after “ranking up”
• There is a noticeable host ping advantage during multiplayer matches
• A players ping is no longer shown as number but same as the console in bars
• There is a noticeable pre-delay of issues when the current host quits playing and the Host Migration starts and you are sometimes kicked back to the lobby to find a new game
• Some of the multiplayer maps seem to be too large for the amount of players the game supports which leads to pointless roaming in game modes
• There are no dedicated servers and multiplayer games rely on IWnet & Steam
• Steam will manage all updates and changes to the game
• There is no PunkBuster; instead cheat protection is through VAC (Valve Anti Cheat)
• There is no way to kick or ban troublesome players when playing in ranked matches
• On the second day after release cheating is already very present
• There are NO multiple accounts or profiles for use with others in your house that would like to play the game – everything has to be played through a single Steam account
• There is no access to the console limiting configuration changes severely
• There is no built in support for SLI/Crossfire configurations
• There is no possibility of future mod tools or modifications for the game at this point
• There is no possibility of future custom maps at this point
• Future DLC will most likely have to be paid for
• Increased cost of the game at $60
• The PC version is a direct console port. Period.

To give IW some benefit of the doubt in regards to all the issues with IWnet; they will have the ability to tweak and reconfigure things as time goes on. They could also change and add features as well which could make it better. However, with the current look of things it would take quite a few tweaks and changes to make this game as successful as it was once touted to be.

After reading more and more of what is actually missing from Modern Warfare 2 and just how”consolized” it sounds like it will be I just can’t believe that IW expects everyone to just run out and buy this game like nothing has changed. Everything has changed!

Numerous times in the BestBuy chat IW states things like “Just do me a favor and play the game first, we put a LOT of work into balance. We are big gamers here at IW and want a great experience just as much as you.” and “Multiplayer is incredible, you should not be worried!” but the problem is we ARE all worried. If IW has so much confidence in IWnet and thinks that this game will be great the way they have developed it then they should put their money where their mouth is and put out a demo of the game. If they have nothing to worry about then it shouldn’t be a problem (well other than the little test setup of the whole IWnet system) and it would satisfy many PC gamers need to know if this is right for them. Ohh but wait; if the game is a total failure and they know there are issues that PC gamers aren’t going to like then I guess they wouldn’t put out a demo. Instead they would just like us to give them $60 to “try” out their new gaming system that sounds like it has some serious issues as a PC game.

I guess the second part of this post is directed to you fellow COD gamers. If you claim to be involved with the MW2 boycott then don’t buy the game when it comes out. Once you hand over your $60 the battle is won. Activision/IW has your money and they don’t care what you do with the game after that point. If you are on the fence at least wait until it releases to get some real reviews and serious player comments from people that actually have played it. It’s understandable to want the game; it is a COD title, but at least wait to do some reading because you could still be swayed.

Infinity Ward has released the official COD:MW2 Launch Trailer and although Eminem rapping in it really doesn’t go well with it at all I have to say it is a very enticing trailer.

As it was posted around the net over the last few days; BestBuy held a live chat session last night with developers of Modern Warfare 2 and allowed the community to join in and ask questions of their own. Now we all know that the PC community is pretty fired up about the whole dedicated server/modding/consolization of MW2 for the PC since the BASHandSLASH.com podcast so of course this chat session was monitored. There was a limit of 300 participants allowed in the chat session and many questions directly related to the dedicated server issue and a few others PC issues were tossed out without so much of a response. The IW participants were Mackey McCandlish who is a level designer/scripter and has worked on numerous COD titles over the years and also Vince Zampella who is a Chief Creative Officer and has worked with IW and a number of other companies over the years.

Although some questions were tossed out there were many questions answered and the bad news is – there is more bad news for the PC community with mentions like the items below.

• The max amount of players is 9 vs 9

• The “lean” function has been removed from the game

• There will be no access to the console

• There will be no /record in the game

The full transcript of the chat can be found in the BestBuy forums but a few notable questions & answers are quoted below.

 

Josh111: PC Question… What will the max amount of players per map be for PC multiplayer on IW.net

Mackey-IW: The max number of players on all platforms are 1v1 through 9v9. This is the number of players we focused on when we were balancing map size, perks, classes, challenges, etc.

 

 

TheNinthAxis: Is there lean in PC multiplayer.

Vince-IW: No.

 

 

frzg: Is there a /record feature? Answer yes… please. We’re trying to give you a ‘chance’

Vince-IW: no

 

 

Laugh: Is there a console in the PC version of the game, so we can change our field of view from the xbox’s default 65 FOV to 80 also can we tweaks the weapon damage for each gun, removes perks, graphical debris, breathing sway, also thru console like we where able to before or is this all gone?

Vince-IW: We would like you to play the game the way we designed and balanced it.

 

 

Moriarte: Ignoring IW.net, is the PC version a direct port of the console version?

Mackey-IW: No, PC has custom stuff like mouse control, text chat in game, and graphics settings.

 

 

TRU-Jennifer: Are you considering dedicated servers for the PC gamer in the near future?

Mackey-IW: Our main focus right now is on making sure the game will work well when it is released (on all platforms)

 

 

Freeman06: Hello, are you considering ever patching in mod tools for the pc to make custom maps and such?

Mackey-IW: Right now we’re focused on launching our game.

 

 

DudezTY: Since we can not kick people in ranked matches, how will we stop hackers who get past VAC?

Mackey-IW: Our goal is to ban hackers from the game

 

 

GeneralClean: So how can you justify 9 vs 9 at the most on PC when we had 32 vs 32 in COD4?

Mackey-IW: The CoD4 maps were not balanced for 32vs32. In MW2 the entire experience is carefully balanced for a smaller range of players.

 

There has been quite a bit of speculation and questioning if there would be another patch or more importantly another map pack for World At War with COD:MW2 set to release very soon and although it looks quite gloomy in the vision of a Map Pack 4, a 1.7 patch was announced through a forum post in the WAW Barracks on Friday by JD_2020.

It is quite odd that it is coming at the time it is. Is this Treyarch’s way of sticking it to Infinity Ward saying that they are standing by the PC community by releasing a patch right at the prime release time of COD:MW2? Maybe I am just over speculating but it sure seems like something more with  the patch being as minor as it is this late in the game for WAW.

With no details stating the actual final release date of the patch, no mention of any work being done on another map pack and the wording on JD’s post about “wrapping up a few of the lingering issues surrounding the PC version of the game” it sounds to me like this will be the final update to the game – but I could be wrong.

The basics on what the patch will include:

• Fixed a voice chat crash on systems with no default recording device selected.
• Fixed an issue causing erroneous duplicate qport errors.
• Server admins can disable team switching by setting g_allow_teamchange to 0. Players will be restricted to Auto-Assign in team-based gametypes.

Did you miss playing with the Treyarch Developers the last time back at the end of September? Well although it doesn’t seem like a big deal it is pretty cool to ever get a chance to play with people that made the games we love. By the means of another forum post in the WAW Barracks by JD_2020; he announced that the Treyarch developers will once again be putting up a server to play with the public on next week.

You can catch the action between the hours of 5:00PM to 6:00PM Pacific Standard Time and if it is the same server they played on last time (they didn’t announce that yet) you can check the status of it below.

Just under two weeks before the release of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 it seems that someone has gotten a hold of a leaked version of it – but not the terribly pirated PC platform that Infinity Ward thinks is so bad – it was actually an XBOX 360 version. With a little searching you can find quite a few screenshots of the leaked XBOX 360 game being taken apart and examined showing different levels and portions of the game.

You can see a good chuck of footage in the video below so if you want to be surprised if/when you buy MW2 you probably don’t want to watch it. If you do I would say to watch it fast because I can’t imagine this staying around long before the Activision legal team starts demands to take it down.

I just did a fresh install of Windows 7 RTM last night and tonight after getting COD:UO reinstalled and patched I fired it up and was greeted with the following.

Now I have been running COD:UO on Windows 7 on and off since the BETA and haven’t had too many issues with it except for PunkBuster. I didn’t really feel like messing with it at that point so I rebooted and logged back into my Windows XP account and fired up COD:UO. To my surprise I got the same exact error. After a few minutes of thinking and a bit of searching it came down to an upgraded graphics card driver because I had also just purchased a new EVGA GTX260 SSC Edition and installed the latest drivers. A quick visit to the NVIDIA forums lead me to a post where a few other individuals were having the same issues with the latest drivers as well.

If you are playing COD:UO then you should hold off on upgrading your graphics card drivers and stick with the slightly older drivers for right now. I uninstalled the 191.07 drivers and installed the 190.62 drivers from the “beta and archived drivers” page and now all is well again. I will test the future releases of the NVIDIA drivers to see if this will continue or if this is just a bug in this version. Lets hope it is just a bug!

Over the last few months I have been struggling with a rather high amount of crashes in WAW in both Windows XP Professional and Windows 7 Ultimate RC with anything from WAW just stops responding to the game just closing without any error dialogue box at all to outright solid freezes of Windows and even a few blue screens every now and then. What would make me the most fumed would be the crashes would almost always seem to happen while playing Zombies (hosting) and would almost always happen when we are in the higher levels. So in general it wasn’t just affecting me because when I crash everyone else is getting the boot.

I have been trying different settings changes and drivers and flip flopping back and fourth between Windows XP and Windows 7 but from what I can gather after narrowing it down the issues seemed to be mostly related to driver problems with my current graphics card; an EVGA 8800GTS 320MB (first gen). Although the crashes have been a little better using older drivers I am still crashing at times and although I haven’t had any problems with ANY other games except WAW I got sick of it and I finally just ordered a new graphics card.

Enter the EVGA NVIDIA GTX260 SSC Edition; PCIe 2.0, 896MB of RAM, 448bit, 675MHz core, 2304MHz memory clock, 216 stream processors and best of all I haven’t had a crash in over 3 weeks now in the same Windows 7 RC install I was running previously.

The downside is the card is big – even bigger than my old 8800GTS and to get this guy in my case I had to shift all my hard drives down to the bottom as far as they would go and shift them towards the front of the case as far as they would go to where they are touching the grill of the intake fan and I am left with about a sixteenth of an inch between the back of the graphics card and the front of my top hard drive. The other downside is I really don’t see any graphical improvements because my 8800GTS already handled WAW on max settings and it was a DirectX 10 card so I was really already seeing everything there was to see but wow does the GTX260 process everything better. Of course I do get better frame rates but the overall smoothness of WAW on max settings now is much better; along with other games but I really don’t play too many other newer games so once again my 8800GTS handled all of those fine without issue. I guess this is an upgrade for MW2 but I don’t know how that game is going to turn out yet so we will have to see how it performs in the future for whatever I buy.