Treyarch: Black Ops II Doesn’t Need a New Game Engine

Another year, another Call of Duty game. It's what people and the series' fans expect, but detractors are also quick to point the annualization out as one of the key reasons why the franchise hasn't evolved that much graphically. While tweaks and modifications has been made in the game's engine, at the end of the day, it's still the same game engine that was used to power Call of Duty 2 — and that was way back in 2005!

This critique, hasn't escaped Treyarch's upcoming Black Ops II. In saying this, studio boss Mark Lamia went on Activision's Social Media Manager Dan Amrich's blog to discuss this matter and to explain their reasoning on why the game doesn't need a new game engine.

Lamia likened the comparison to working on an old house that just got remodeled and said, "Just because you’re remodeling the house and it will look new or it will have a new kitchen, you don’t tear out the foundation, or break out some of the framing. You might even go as hardcore as replacing the plumbing, and we will do that sort of thing, as an analogy. It’s a gross simplification.”

He also add that there’s still a lot of “good” left in the foundation that you wouldn’t get rid of, what they do instead is look to advance in areas that support their game design.

The Treyarch chief also thinks that the constant badgering of people for Call of Duty to use a new game engine is born out of people wanting to say that the franchise is trying something new.

“I think the whole thing about a new engine…sometimes that’s a great buzzword. Well, I have a new graphics engine — is that a new engine? Where does it start and stop? Elements of the code, you can trace back for a very very long time…but whole parts of the code are entirely new. Two areas we did focus on for this game were the graphics and the lighting — a pretty significant amount of work is going into that.”

However, that doesn’t mean complaints and the necessity to make a better looking game is falling on deaf ears. Lamia believes that when people are asking for a new game engine, all they’re really asking for is a better-looking game.

“I think what people are asking for is for us to push. They want us to make a better-looking game; they want things. I don’t think those are things people can’t ask for. We asked ourselves that very same question — we wanted to advance the graphics. I think the questions are valid. The answer may not need to be an entirely new engine, but you might need to do an entire overhaul of your entire lighting system. The trick is, we’re not willing to do that if we can’t keep it running at 60 frames per second — but we did that this time. So this is the Black Ops II engine."

Not to add fuel to an already big fire, but didn't all of this start because DICE unveiled the Frosbite 2 game engine for Battlefield 3? If they didn't publicly state that they were using an all-new game engine to power BF3, would people still care?

Whatever the reason or case is, I just hope Treyarch and the other Call of Duty teams at Activision get a new workhorse for the next generation of Call of Duty games…it's about time, no?

Source: One of Swords Blog