Call of Duty: Black Ops 3 Developer Explains Three Year Development Time

Call of Duty: Black Ops 3 was announced earlier this week to a hugely positive reception. For any fans of the franchise, this was a momentous occasion, marking a continuation of the Call of Duty brand. While nobody expected the franchise to disappear, there's been an extra year of development time spent on the game.

In an interview with Game Informer, Black Ops 3 multiplayer director Dan Bunting explained the studio's reasoning for delaying the game past its normal two-year development cycle.

“In the two-year development cycles, the kinds of risks we're taking right now, we wouldn't be able to do with just two years because it needs so much iteration," Bunting explained. “[We iterated on the first set of multiplayer maps for] a year. That's three maps we were working on and each one was constructed in a different way so that we could learn how the different map shapes and the different ways that you pace combat felt differently with the different moving mechanics as they came in."

Essentially, what Bunting is saying with this statement, is that you can expect Black Ops 3 to be one of the biggest Call of Duty games yet. This extra year of polish and content will, hopefully, make Black Ops 3 a step above the rest of the games in the franchise.

Bunting elaborated on the multiplayer system that is to be implemented in this next Call of Duty:

“Before there was the Pick 10 in Black Ops II, we were going down the path of starting to do character archetypes, which we had dabbled in with every single game before that," Bunting said. “This time, having the three-year cycle was a place and time where we actually had the time to flesh that out."