Black Ops 2 Game Director Details Multiplayer Deathstreaks, Leveling & More

While we already know a ton of details regarding Black Ops 2's multiplayer, there are still a few pertinent things that fans want to know regarding the game's bread-and-butter multiplayer.

Lucky for us that Black Ops 2 Game Director David Vonderhaar took a little bit of time out of his busy schedule to answer some of 'em! In a recent podcast with Activision Social Media Manager Dan Amrich, Vonderhaar answers questions regarding Deathstreaks, Final Stand and a lot more.

Vonderhaar on Second Chance/Last Chance/Final Stand:

There’s no Second Chance; there’s no Last Stand, there’s no Final Stand. There’s no combination whatsoever of perk or deathstreak that puts the guy in the “downed” state in multiplayer. It’s still used as the revival state in Zombies when you get downed. But it’s not in multiplayer — there is no perk and there are no deathstreaks, so there is no Final Stand or equivalent of it. Absolutely not. Please stop yelling at me.

Vonderhaar or otherwise known as "Vahn" on looping scorestreak rewards. This could either be good or bad news depending on your point-of-view, but at least they adjusted it to not be exploitable.

It’s something we are pretty happy with at this point. It does wrap around, but you can’t earn more than one of a type. Let’s say you took UAV and Counter UAV. If you earned the UAV then earned the Counter UAV, you’re going to start buildingagain for the UAV — but if you haven’t spent it, if you haven’t called it in or activated it, you’re not going to get a second one. You’re just going to get notified that you’re back at that part of the chain. You would definitely want to activate those scorestreaks so when you loop, you’ll get them again. It’s not like Black Ops 1, which is they just keep going forever and you effectively have to die to loop. You don’t have to die to loop at any point; you’ll just keep looping. 

Vahn on rewarding more aggressive players (ie: non-campers) with more score:

There are definitely events, particularly in objective-based game modes, where you are going to get more score for being on the aggressive side. For example, capturing a flag required you to get a flag in the first place. Those things are harder to do than, say, sitting at the back of your base, defending your flag. So those aggressive-style actions usually award more score, in general, because guys who are out trying to do those things die a lot more than the guys at the back of the field.

On hearing your downed enemy's mic for a few seconds after you killed them (dubbed "Revenge Voice by Treyarch)"

It’s an option that you can turn on and off in custom games. We gave it a name — “Revenge Voice.” It’s on in public games; we can turn it off in league play if we want. We love that thing — it’s funny.

Lastly, on leveling up and in earning new gear/equipment:

When you start at level 1, you will start leveling up and you will get to level 4. You will unlock create-a-class and you will have four unlock tokens, one for each level. You will then have a range of things you can spend those unlock tokens on — but not everything. By the time you’re up to level 55, you have — surprise — 55 tokens. So along the way, you’ve been deciding how to spend those tokens on content that’s been level-gated. Level-gated content includes all the weapons, all the perks, all the equipment — tactical and lethal grenades — as well as the wildcards. Those things are all level-gated and they all require tokens to unlock.

Bam, I’m level 55, I have 55 things from anything that was available in create-a-class — but only 55, because you only get 55 tokens and there’s over 100 pieces of content. That’s 1 through 55. You go and you Prestige…the way we’re looking at this right at this moment in time is, because you’re Prestige, you can pick out one of those things and hold on to it as you continue through the Prestige progression. So 1 through 55 is set in stone, we’re happy with it. What we’re working on right now is making sure Prestige feels just as good.

Now, keep in mind that Black Ops 2 is still a game in development and some of the stuff mentioned here could change before the game's released. 

Be sure to listen to the whole podcast, as Vahn also goes into perk balancing, killcam behaviour, infiinte sprint and more. 

So, how are you liking the changes and adjustments Treyarch has made so far? Could this be the best Call of Duty multiplayer experience ever or is it still Call of Duty 4? I'd also like to add another question, look at the headline image, is that character model on the left Vonderhaar himself? Sure seems like it, no?

Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 is set for release on November 13 for the PC, Xbox 360 and PS3.