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Call of Duty: Black Ops– the 10 weapons & items you MUST try

Posted: Mon Nov 08, 2010 6:24 pm
by tonyuk73
By Keith Stuart.
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Black Ops design director David Vonderhaar takes us through the key additions to the Call of Duty arsenal...

There are just a few hours to go before the launch of the latest Call of Duty gun-a-thon, and if you're thinking of hitting the multiplayer servers, we thought we'd give you an idea of what to look out for as you gain experience. Last week, I sat down with Black Ops design director David Vonderhaar who guided me through a selection of the most interesting new weapons and items in the game.

Predictably, selecting and balancing the armoury is a key element of the CoD design process. The team closely examine all the weapon specifications, but then convert these into game-friendly maxims, ensuring there's always a trade-off between power and usability. As Vonderhaar explains, "We use the weapon's calibre only to figure out where it should fall in the damage ranges. So take the AK-47 – it uses a very high calibre bullet compared to other weapons, so we'll make that gun higher damager, but we'll offset it with higher inaccuracies or slower reloads. And then guns that have low calibre ammunition, we usually make more accurate but less deadly. It's a general game design rule but it's not hard and fast. You don't want to accidentally make any one gun over-powered, and it's tough when you've got 40 guns in the game. But they all fall within certain ranges – it's very systems driven. We take it very seriously"

Before each multiplayer bout, you can equip yourself with an array of useful non-weaponry items, and we've highlighted a few of these too…

Weapons

Heckler & Koch G11 assault rifle
A chunky angular burst fire rifle that uniquely loads from the top. It's a classified weapon so to get it, you need to buy all the other assault rifles, but it's worth a look, as it's spectacularly deadly (though as a burst fire weapon, you can't shoot it that fast). "It's a beast of a gun," says Vonderhaar. "It's a weapon that was prototyped, but it didn't see mass distribution. There aren't many around." So how did Vonderhaar and his team stumble upon it? "We use a lot of gun reference materials and spend a lot of time researching pre-production weapons. We basically make a list of every gun even remotely near our time period, some before some after – because if it's a prototype weapon you don't know what year it was introduced. And if you're an SOG officer, you're the perfect person to test these weapons." Turns out, the G11 used a proprietary caseless ammunition, which is why it didn't make it into production: the military likes to use standard ammo.

China Lake pump action grenade launcher
Developed specifically for Navy SEALs forces and deployed during Vietnam, the China Lake is another brute force weapon with a delayed firing mechanism. This time you're forced to aim down the sight before shooting, thus adding latency to counter-balance the weapon's horrendous damage potential. "You can't really use it effectively as an all-round offensive weapon. It's very good for shooting into the middle of objectives, blowing up cars with it, but it's only got two rounds of ammo and it takes forever to shoot it."

CZ75 with full-auto upgrade
This is usually a standard semi-automatic pistol, but it can be upgraded with a forward clip to become a full-auto pistol – the only one in Black Ops. You'll need to buy every other pistol in the game to get it, but it's a unique, powerful weapon.

HS-10 shotgun
Another classified weapon, so you have to buy all the shotguns to unlock it. "We were really trying to find some crazy shotguns," says Vonderhaar. "The shotgun has got this core design principle to it, and there's been very little change – if you find a shotgun from the '40s or '50s and compare it with one that was manufactured yesterday, it looks the same – a 12 gauge shell with a long barrel. It's hard to find unique versions. But we stumbled across the HS10 and similarly to the G11, it was an experimental weapon, I think it was envisioned by a police sergeant who wanted a shotgun he could conceivably hold with one hand, so he could use a flashlight at the same time. So this is the only shotgun in the game which allows you to use two at the same time." It's powerful, but again, there's a price: it's only got four shots, it's slow to reload and it kicks like an enraged stallion.

PSG1 sniper rifle
A brand new sniper rifle for the CoD series. "I love this rifle," says Vonderhaar. "We've not been in a period yet which has let us use it – and it's still a little experimental for our time range…" The rifle has a variable zoom scope, which lets you circle through three levels of magnification for ultra precise aiming.

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PSG1 sniper rifle

Stoner 63 rifle
Eugene Stoner was the weapon designer responsible for much of the groundwork on the AR-15 (M16) and Colt Commando rifles. "He pioneered the concept of modular weapons – a gun that could be manufactured, but then if you needed an LMG version of it you could fit something to do that," explains Vonderhaar. "When we stumbled on the Stoner 63, it was fascinating. I mean, lots of things are modular now, it's a common design practise. But in 1963, no one was thinking about modular anything. This guy's a total visionary – I'm not a gun nerd, but it's an interesting story, how he made interchangeable parts, and how the guns could be reconfigured. That was why we put the Stoner 63 in. It's a very fast firing LMG, but actually it's a hybrid, it's also an assault rifle. You can't really classify his guns anymore." Like the China Lake grenade launcher, the Stoner 63 was used in limited numbers by the US Navy SEALs in Vietnam.

Equipment

Camera spike
Simply place this anywhere on the map, switch it on, and your mini-map in the corner of the screen is replaced by an image showing live video footage from your electronic spy. Cleverly, wherever you're looking where you place the spike, that's where the camera will focus: so plant it when you're staring straight up and the image it'll feed back to you will be of the sky above. Naturally, snipers will be able to use the camera spike to ensure no-one sneaks up on them. "I like to stick it on the flag in Capture The Flag games when I'm defending, " says Vonderhaar. "Most maps are designed to have three main routes that go from one end to the other, so I'll use it to watch the path I'm not directly guarding."

Jammer
This handy box can be placed anywhere in the game environment; when an enemy wanders within its radius the device will scramble their radar. Vonderhaar then shows me a handy cubbyhole on the Summit map where the jammer can be perfectly hidden. You need to jump up on some mainframe computers in a control room then leap across to an upper platform. "I've never shown anyone this before," he admits.

Motion sensor
Plant this anywhere, and if an enemy chances into its radius, they'll appear as a red dot on your mini-map; just like when a spy plane goes overhead. There's a perk that counters the sensor, but if you don't have it, the operator will know you've arrived. So what differentiates this from the camera spike, if both are about monitoring player positions? "Good question," responds Vonderhaar. "The motion sensor won't tell you which direction the enemy is running in because of the delay in the pings –you'll just now that there was a guy nearby. With the camera spike, you can see people, you can see how many of them there are, what direction they've taken your flag in, it's always showing you something."

Decoy grenade
This is a tactical grenade that, once lobbed into an area, jumps around making a firing noise while flooding your enemies' mini-maps with red dots, indicating a big fight. As Vonderhaar explains, "This was inspired by a real device that we learned about from Major John Plaster, who was an SOG operative during Vietnam. This guy's amazing, he came in and talked to us for two days. They used to go into places like Laos and Cambodia, where they weren't supposed to be; and when they were trying to get the hell out, they'd have this board covered in firecrackers – they would light it and throw it, so the guys chasing them would get confused about where Plaster and his team were. So we took this concept, fictionalised components of it, and made up this tactical decoy."

The idea is, you throw one into an open location, and when the red dots start showing up on your enemies' mini-maps, they charge in expecting a massive skirmish – what they get is you standing behind the door, waiting to quitely take them out. "It's great for trapping red dot hunters, the guys who will always be checking their mini-map to see where the enemy is. And this is very satisfying because you're punishing the best players in the game. I don't think you'll see it used in Team Deathmatch – people start to tune out the dots because there's so much going on. But in the games that are a little slower, the tactical multiplayer modes, the decoy will have a big role.

Re: Call of Duty: Black Ops– the 10 weapons & items you MUST

Posted: Tue Aug 02, 2011 2:58 am
by eDwaRdz
The best weapons , especially the PSG1 sniper rifle looks cool and good, I like it.

Re: Call of Duty: Black Ops– the 10 weapons & items you MUST

Posted: Mon May 30, 2016 2:45 am
by salvatore12
I agree with PSG1.
It's no scoping is very higher than other weapons. When if stripped, the PSG1 has an incredibly beefy extractor relative to a run of the mill G3.