Yesterday the hotly anticipated Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 was released into the wild and has been snapped up by the general public in its millions, but many have found the game to be extremely similar to an instalment of EA’s space-soap-opera Mass Effect 2. Indeed reports from reviewers and players alike are saying that the game simply is Mass Effect 2 in a new engine’s graphical layering. To investigate we sent our investigator, me, to Treyarch’s headquarters to find out just what was going on.
“It did seem all a bit familiar…” said Treyarch’s lead developer, Mark Lamia when I pretended I worked for the PA Report. “The thing is, these days we’re just never too sure if we’re supposed to feel like that all the time anyway, I mean Infinity Ward used to send us entire level designs they rejected and we’d make them. Ever since they fell apart we’ve had basically no guidance, I guess we must’ve all just immediately started subconsciously copying our favourite game of this generation. We set it in the near future, we made choices and morality a big deal, we even have loyalty missions. God we really should have seen this coming. Ah well, at least we didn’t make Mass Effect 3.”
Many gamers have taken the news with a sense of relief, fearing that the changes to the series Treyarch proposed at E3 would be unfamiliar and unsettling, but by producing a game everyone has played already those fears have been put to rest. Indeed many have cited the game as the best in the series on the basis it’s the least Call of Duty-esque game of the lot.
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