Giving us a look at the Zombies mode inside Call of Duty: Black Ops 3, Activision and Treyarch published a new video today featuring the Shadows of Evil prologue.
The description says:
Shadows of Evil introduces four unwitting characters who must uncover the secrets and challenges laid out for them by a shadowy figure, who offers them a path to redemption. Jeff Goldblum, Heather Graham, Neal McDonough, and Ron Perlman star in Shadows of Evil, a new survival co-op experience only available in Call of Duty: Black Ops III. Unravel the secrets and explore a massive 1940s, film noir-inspired world in the deepest Zombies experience to date.
In other Black Ops 3 news, Jason Blundell, Treyarch’s Director of Campaign and Zombies mode, talked about the recent announcement that the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 versions would have the campaign removed altogether.
Elaborating on Activision’s statement that the 1-4 player co-op campaign “could not be faithfully recreated on old generation hardware,” Blundell told Eurogamer that part of his job is to push the team to “get every ounce of power and energy and memory out of the current gen consoles.”
He continued:
We being Treyarch, we’re only looking at the current-gen stuff, so PS4 and Xbox One. And when we hear the old-gen stuff start having to take things away to be able to make it perform on those machines… they’re like, ‘okay, we’re going to have to lose this, and lose that, and bring this back in,’ from a purely selfish point of view, I completely agreed with Activision’s decision to cut the campaign, because I don’t want you to get a second-rate experience. So I agreed on that level.
Adding that he would “hate for someone to get something that isn’t true to the vision,” Blundell explained that every level in the co-op-enabled campaign is bigger than any previous level they’ve done, and the draw distances are much longer. Because of this, there are “certain scenes you just couldn’t do” and “you’d have to bring in the clipping distance and do some fogging.”
Another reason for the campaign cancellation on PS3/360 has to do with the verticality in levels. Since you can approach areas from different angles, Blundell says they would’ve had to dumb down the game for last-gen consoles:
A lot of those concepts would have to have been cut, or you would have lost sections of it, because it would have been too much weight on the system. You’d have to dumb it down so much you wouldn’t get the graphical fidelity you’d need to convey certain lighting feels. There are certain levels where the lighting complexity sets a certain mood or a vibe of anticipation.
Meanwhile, if you participated in the Black Ops 3 beta, the Morg City Zombies theme is now available to you:
[Source: Eurogamer]
