COD: Black Ops MP preceded campaign

By Tom Bramwell Published 1 June, 2010

Single-player team could reuse MP assets.

Treyarch's Josh Olin has said that multiplayer in Call of Duty: Black Ops was underway so early that the single-player guys have been using multiplayer assets to speed up production.

"We've had a dedicated team working on that since day one," Olin, who is Treyarch's community manager, told IGN about the online side of the game.

"Let me put it in perspective for you. We had multiplayer started and up and running in the project so early that some single-player levels actually are being built around multiplayer maps that we had in production.

"So it's not the other way around," he said, referring to the accepted wisdom that multiplayer tends to follow single-player. "It's not single-player maps being brought into multiplayer, it's multiplayer being brought into single-player, so that's how ahead of the game they were."

Call of Duty: Black Ops puts players in a team of deniable operatives doing Special Forces business during the Cold War. It takes place in Vietnam and other areas around the globe.

Check out our detailed Call of Duty: Black Ops preview to find out more about the setting, walk through a couple of scenarios and hear about cool weapons like the dragon's-breath explosive shotgun and the crossbow.

Call of Duty: Black Ops is due out for PC, PS3 and Xbox 360 on 9th November.

Picture of Tom.

About Tom Bramwell

Tom is Operations director of Eurogamer Network and Editor-at-Large of Eurogamer.net. He joined the company in February 2000.

Read more articles from Tom by visiting the Tom Bramwell archive page.

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Comments (19) Latest comment 2 years ago

Comments threads automatically close after 30 days, but please feel free to continue chatting on the forum!

  • Ignatius_Cheese #1 2 years ago

    Is that necessarily a good thing...?

  • bodypopper #2 2 years ago

    How long before CoD multiplayer is sold on its own I wonder? Especially with all those lucrative £10 add-ons to hawk on top?

  • STEVE-O- #3 2 years ago

    Hopefully this means they have some awesome new Zombie-like mode :)

  • liamthemaster #4 2 years ago

    wait so they're building single player maps around maps that are meant for multiplayer and have nothing to do with the story,doesn't sound good to me.

  • Fab4 #5 2 years ago

    Fuck the maps, do you still implement the lame-ass perk/kill streak system, and use dodgy netcode?

  • Kyledanutmeg #6 2 years ago

    What's there to work on in the multiplayer? It's the same every year.

  • Gambit1977 #7 2 years ago

    Sounds like the old Battlefield games, pre Bad Company.

  • Chazmeister #8 2 years ago

    So the single player game will be crap then.

  • frugtkompot #9 2 years ago

    It'll be a loose assembling of set pieces, where some are awesome and some are shit. Just like MW2.

    COD is all about the multi. Treyarch knows that, IW knows that, Activision knows that - and honestly, we know that too.

  • LR100 #10 2 years ago

    Can't decide if that's good or bad.

  • tachometer #11 2 years ago

    With the amount of time I'm going to spend on the multiplayer I'm glad they have prioritised it. I wonder if they cut the single player out completely they could get away with selling the game for £30 and no one would mind.

  • SHPanda #12 2 years ago

    I'm not bothered about screenshots, I'm not bothered about changing the Perk/Kill Streak reward systems, I'm not bothered about single player being based on MP maps. What I'm bothered about is Activision and Treyarch finding a way to rid the game of the cheats, glitchers and whoever else "plays" the game with the sole purpose of ruining it for everyone else.

  • Brainz #13 2 years ago

    next step is they develop the DLC first and wrap SP/MP around it ...

  • Mosphaiti #14 2 years ago

    i am looking foward to this, but how its doing multiplayer before single player being ahead of the game? Youve still got to do both elements, so its going to take the same amount of time. Im just thinking its perhaps not a great idea , story should probably come first. Who knows though, id like them to prove me wrong

  • makeamazing #15 2 years ago

    Sounds to me that COD BO is going to be another MW2 scripted nightmare... looks like i'm going to have to look towards MOH and hope they remember what these games used to be like (great single player with interesting mp).

  • Dylbot #16 2 years ago

    CODBO FELLA MATE would do good to completely avoid the path taken by MW2. Unfortunately, this looks not to be the case.

  • LazyNinjaUk #17 2 years ago

    Call me a pessimist but I thought MP using SP levels was bad because you'd be playing through the same levels in both modes. So how is having it the other way round any better?

    Surely having entirely unique levels between both modes is better...?

  • carlitoswagon #18 2 years ago

    What about not developing another cod for a few years and giving it a fucking break.

  • Zaiz #19 2 years ago

    I hope they use killstreaks, we'll probably see some Unconventional Weapons(tm) such as satellite dogs, explosive sheep, and cyborg dogs with instant kill lasers taped to their skulls.