During a recent IGN live streaming event of Treyarch’s upcoming Call of Duty: Black Ops 2, game design director David Vonderhaar went into some interesting details regarding the type of spawning system that you can expect in Black Ops 2′s multiplayer.

Spawning (re-entering a match after a death) can easily make or break a competitive first-person shooter like Black Ops 2. It can swiftly become a source of major frustration if players are constantly spawned either too far away from the action or too close to harm’s way. It’s never fun when a death is caused by a faulty spawn system and it’s something that must be handled with care.

Previous Call of Duty titles have always implemented slightly different spawn system set-ups – some more successful than others. Some titles have required significant patching before it was considered smooth. It can also differ from game mode to game mode within just one title. So, how do you get something so tricky and so touchy right? David Vonderhaar gave us a small glimpse into what the team at Treyarch had in mind when developing Black Ops 2′s spawn set-up during the live stream.

Vonderhaar explained that, ideally, a player should never feel so far away from the action that he or she needs to run miles just to get back into the fire fight, but one should never just be dropped immediately into harm’s way as well. That’s pretty obvious, right? While he couldn’t get into the mathematics, he did specifically mention the “3-second rule.” According to Vonderhaar, data is constantly being gathered during play tests to measure how often someone is shot at (or able to shoot at someone) within 3 seconds of spawning. The ultimate goal here is to make sure that that does not happen. If action is met within the 3-second mark, it might prove a little too fast-paced for most players.

Vonderhaar mentioned that, so far, the rate of successful spawning it pretty high, so hopefully that will be kept up after launch. We’ll see in only a few short days when Black Ops 2 drops November 13 on the Xbox 360, PC and PS3.

What do you guys think? Does that sound like a reasonable rule? Which past Call of Duty do you feel had the best spawn system so far?

Posted: Nov 09, 2012 7:45 am
Related Forum: Call of Duty Forum

Source: http://mp1st.com/2012/11/08/treyarch-game-design-director-details-black-ops-2-spawn-system-and-the-3-second-rule/