Call of Duty: Black Ops 3 Story Has "Some Really Screwed Up Mind-F***ery"

Activision's upcoming shooter Call of Duty: Black Ops 3 will feature a storyline set 40 years after the events concluding Black Ops 2. Developer Treyarch has described the game's narrative as "twisted," and one that will leave players reeling. Speaking to GameSpot in an interview, studio design director David Vonderhaar said, "A lot of the mystery of the latest trailer and all the story stuff is there because there is some really screwed up mind-f***ery going to happen to you when you play the game. That's the Black Ops narrative, that's intentional in design."

"We're doing that on purpose because that's the Black Ops way, right? This is covert ops. This is, "I'm not sure what's going on with me right now, I'm not who I think I am. Are all these things normal?" This is an important part of storytelling, and I will not give it away. But it's not hard to understand the story. You're a Black Ops operative. Your counterparts have gone off the grid in a world where you're connected and wired all the time. There's a huge leak of military intelligence and you're sent in to investigate that. So we set it up that way and we send you up and along the way, we untangle a huge weavy story; a very deep, very dark, and sometimes really twisted narrative experience," Vonderhaar explained. He also discussed the process the studio employed when designing weapons for a game set in the future.

"As a first-person shooter, you're obviously focused on weapon design. The weapons team will basically plot how weapons have evolved over time, and they'll project beyond where we are. They'll turn themselves into futurists so that they put the weapons where they would be in 2065 in our timeline, which is a very distinct timeline. Someone else's 2065 might be very different than the Treyarch Black Ops 2065," Vonderhaar said. "Plausible, feasible, and grounded in reality are actually our mantras, they're really important parts of what we do. We take some liberties where we think it makes sense for the story and the narrative, as you might expect. Obviously, the DNI and neural interface stuff. All the augmentation in the game, and that whole theme, is not unrealistic. It's actually quite plausible. You can see the roots of that stuff right now."