Call of Duty: Black Ops Wish List
The ultimate speculative guide to the fall's biggest war game.

Brian Miggels says: As IGN's self-professed biggest Call of Duty addict (I've logged over 1,400 hours in the franchise over the span of the last three installments) you won't find an editor more excited to blast through Call of Duty: Black Ops this fall. I was totally hooked on Treyarch's last Call of Duty game, World at War, so I have nothing but lofty expectations for what they're putting out this time around. That being said, every franchise can benefit from improvement and the Call of Duty franchise is no exception. I've also enlisted (see what I did there?) another resident first-person shooter fan and persistent Call of Duty skeptic Brian Altano to throw his thoughts into the mix. So how can Treyarch make the perfect Call of Duty game? Here are a few humble suggestions.

Brian Altano says: I'll be brutally honest right out the gate: I'm one of the few gamers on Earth that doesn't really care for online multiplayer in my first-person shooters. I'll take an epic single-player story over little kids screaming racist epithets in to my headset over Xbox Live any day of the week. But it's a testament to how addictive the Call of Duty franchise's multiplayer is that such a large majority of players decide to skip over the single-player entirely. It's a shame too, as the franchise has continuously provided an excellently paced, albeit way too short, series of single-player campaigns over the last few years. Yet aside from getting repeatedly murdered on veteran mode, there's little incentive to replay it after the four or five hours it usually takes to finish them. But why hire voice actors, create detailed environments and script out a story when it's all over so fast? I'd love to see a more elaborate, slightly slower paced single-player campaign that favored depth and story over people screaming at me and telling me to run towards things before, after and while they explode.

Brian Altano says: Call it blind retro fetishism, but it's sort of baffling that a game like Goldeneye 007 for the N64 tackled its single-player mode better than most modern shooters. Playing on different difficulty settings meant branching paths with distinctly unique objectives, environment exploration and gadgets to interact with. And that was in 1997. Black Ops could totally benefit from a similarly structured experience and would inspire players to revisit the single player side of things multiple times. I'm not asking for paintball mode or big head mode, but throw in some cool single and multiplayer unlockable rewards for finishing the story on multiple difficulties and the deal will effectively be sweetened.

Brian Miggels says: Treyarch surprised everyone with the introduction of the Nazi Zombie Survival modes and the three downloadable expansion packs that took World at War to a whole new level. These wacky add-ons brought a much needed balance to the main game, so why not expand on them more? The initial Nazi zombie mode took place in four different survival maps – complete with different weapons, player perks and an underlying story that had the enthusiasts gripped from start to finish. And since they're already confirmed to return, we'd like to see a lot more from the Zombie multiplayer modes in Black Ops. How about team deathmatch with the undead as bystanders, or objective based survival scenarios with lots of brand new maps to experiment with?

Brian Altano says: I know that the Call of Duty games are supposed to be based on the gritty, hyper realistic world of actual wars, but it's when the series goes a bit over the top that it reaches its most fun. These are videogames after all, and the liberties that Treyarch took with the absurdly insane Nazi zombie mode weapons were some of the best parts of World at War. So why not let us use ray guns and laser beams in competitive online multiplayer? Even if it's just an optional mode, I want to see soldiers teleporting all over the map as they blast each other to oblivion with retro sci-fi weaponry?

Brian Miggels says: I really didn't like the tanks in Call of Duty: World at War. This really comes down to personal preference, but it really led to uneven gameplay in multiplayer. If I joined late in an online game and noticed that the other team had tanks while my team was left tank-less, I was pretty much promised a bloodbath. Tanks were unbalanced and didn't mesh well with the standard multiplayer modes and should be omitted from Black Ops unless Treyarch manages to revamp their implementation entirely.

Brian Miggels says: Recently, games like Just Cause 2 have allowed players to upload crazy in-game happenings directly to YouTube to share with the world, and since Black Ops will surely provide lots of incredible and insane kills, it'd be awesome to be able to share them with likeminded murderers.

Brian Miggels says: This is more something that I would have liked to see in Modern Warfare 2 than a wish for inclusion in Black Ops, but since Treyarch included squad pairing in World at War, I'd like to see it get carried over. Squad pairing gives people the opportunity to make friends on the fly and pair up with players that are at a similar level of experience. This allowed match crossover so you didn't have to head back in to the lobby to join up with people that you met in-game. I can't count how many times I used this feature in World at War. Sometimes it's those little moments of convenience that matter most.

Brian Altano says: One of the biggest annoyances in Call of Duty: World at War was the seemingly never-ending horde of respawning enemies during the campaign mode. The difficulty setting in the game seemed like it was directly related to the amount of enemies that would attack you over the course of the level. The main issue was that a player never really knew if they were battling through a predetermined set of enemies or if they would just continue to spawn forever, at least until they passed a certain checkpoint.

Things like that act as little more than a homage to poor, archaic game design. Modern Warfare 2 seemed to fix this by replacing these unstoppable monster closets with strategically placed enemies and I'd like to see this level design carried across all of the Call of Duty games. Firing countless rounds at a mass of enemies doesn't take any skill – neither does running to a checkpoint. Personally, I'd rather use strategy to overcome a level.

Brian Miggels says: Sure, we may have just clamored for over-the-top sci-fi weapons and zombies having more prominence in Black Ops' multiplayer mode, but the single player campaign is centered around some pretty serious stuff and should be handled as such.

Call of Duty: Black Ops is confirmed to include Vietnam War inspired battles during its campaign mode, which begs the question: Is no subject matter immune from the war game genre? When I first heard that Black Ops was touching on Vietnam, I immediately shuddered – there aren't many ways Treyarch can handle the subject matter sensitively. I'm just hoping that they did their research and went in to the game knowing that they're tackling a highly controversial subject matter. Respect for the politics and people involved should be their number one priority.

Brian Altano says: And please, ease up on the whole "knifing dogs in the head" thing, if only for that ungodly gurgling whelp the poor mutts utter as you put them to rest.

So what do you want to see in Call of Duty: Black Ops? Fire helicopters? Laser cats? Or maybe just something simple, like competently implemented matchmaking in the PC version? Let us know in the comments section. Brian Altano & Brian Miggels