You might have seen the robots in Black Ops 3's initial reveal and thought they looked a bit like Terminators, and you'd be right, with Treyarch studio head Mark Lamia explaining more about how the tin army works. Kill-bots, unsurprisingly, have completely different tactics on the battlefield.
Speaking in this month's Official PlayStation Magazine, Lamia explains more about what to expect in Black Ops 3: "robots don’t worry about self-preservation like humans do, so we could create more interesting formations," he says. That means players who think they know what to expect in a COD gunfight are in for a surprise. "They’re robots, they’re networked which means they’ll take on formations that look robotic. So V formations, line formations, different kinds that you wouldn’t expect from humans on the battlefield where shit’s going on and things are going crazy, right? But because they’re networked robots, they’ll create formations and it’ll be surprising and fun for the Call of Duty players who have never seen that stuff going on inside our battlefields".
It's the new robot tactics that have lead to Black Ops 3's new AI, which sounds like one of the largest revisions the series has seen for a while in that area. Lamia talks of dynamic AI responding to the interplay of human, vehicle and robot elements, further mixed up by "40 agnostic abilities that a player could enter a battle in". It means the game "has to actually adapt and respond and there has to be emergent AI in those situations".
Then there's the small fact that robots are really hard to kill. "If their legs are blown off, they’re just robots and they’ll keep coming at you," Lamia points out. "They can still fire, so stuff is on the ground and you still need to take it out. It introduces a lot of new variety inside the gameplay. And they’re just really fun to blow up - parts of them come off – they can still come at you. You can blow off a limb and they can still be coming at you – it’s a robot, right?"
Given the COD series' affinity for movie quotes and references expect at least one line from one of the Terminator movies and, please God, this:
The new issue of Official PlayStation Magazine is on sale on Friday the 8th.You can buy a copyhereorsubscribeto future issues.
