Videos and Information

TheSixthAxis wrote:In a posting on the official blog, Treyarch’s community manager Josh Olin has talked about some enhancements in the PS3 version of Black Ops.

Custom Games Editor.
Gives hosts the ability to customise every single aspect of the game right down to the mode, score and time limits to the weapons or perks available. This can be saved in your File Share so your friends or the community can browse and download it.

Friends List Enhancements.
The PS3 fiends list has been integrated in to the Black Ops user interface, so rather than a simple list of fiends appearing as is the norm, within Black Ops you’ll be able to browse Recent Players, Friends, navigate their File Shares, Recent Games, Combat Records – all within this in-game menu system designed to streamline the social process within the game. Sending game invites and joining Friends’ games has never been simpler.

Regional Matchmaking & Party Privacy.
As you’d expect from such a customisable experience, it’s possible to add filters to matchmaking for global, regional and local games. In addition, it will now be possible to join games in progress via the new friends list interface rather than having to sit it out in the lobby. The party leaders will also be able to lock down games to invite only, friends only or even closed.

The big win for the PS3, is obviously the friends list enhancements, this builds on the work done in Modern Warfare 2 which was the first (and still one of the few) PS3 games to use cross-game invites. The manipulation of your friends and recently played list along with being able to browse their stats and file shares is a pretty nifty feature that we look forward to trying out when the game is released on November 9th.

Note: The headline on this article has been changed to reflect the fact that a lot of this info also relates to the Xbox 360 version of the game. The fact that this article was sourced from the PS blog is reflected in its leaning towards that console. Apologies for any confusion!

TheSixthAxis wrote:We’ve already been over the next Call of Duty’s multiplayer features, but official word this morning is that the game will support split-screen single console online multiplayer, but there’s a caveat on PS3: anyone wanting to play online split-screen multiplayer with a mate will only be able to sign in the second player as a temporary guest, not under their own PSN profile.

“You can connect a second controller and bring a guest online,” says the US Blog, which details lots of other additions to the multiplayer. This means, for example, if you’re signed into the PSN as “nofi” then the second player must be “nofi(1)” rather than their own PSN profile.

This obviously also means that the progress of the guest will be lost when you sign out, although you can “rank up” and “earn unlocks”.

Confusingly, a lot of the earlier comments in the Blog article are celebrating the ability to sign in as two different PSN accounts, so I’m assuming the text of the article changed after a couple of hours (probably around about comment 114) as the tone of the comments certainly changed to reflect the news above as the facts started to trickle in and required an edit to the new.

Of course, you can have two players playing split-screen online on an Xbox 360, but only if they’re both paying Gold customers. I guess you get what you pay for, as this is a PSN limitation, not something Activision or Treyarch are responsible for