12. The Story
There will always be a debate in gaming circles over the relationship between gameplay and story, and which is the more important for ensuring the overall quality of a game. Black Ops managed a happy balance between the two, unlike Infinity Ward's MW3, and thankfully, it appears that the sequel will follow up that success. And perhaps chiefly thanks to the presence of Goyer, what we know of the story already makes for compelling reading. Set across two different time periods - the 80s and 2025 - the game focuses on the events of two Cold Wars, united by the influence of one malevolent force, namely Raul Menendez, who takes it upon himself to escalate the new Cold War between China and the US over rare minerals. Along the way, wonderfully, he turns the US army's drone army against them, creating a Skynet situation that requires the intervention of some human soldiers with a certain set of skills. It all reads like a compelling action movie, but the greatest appeal of the story however lies in the fact that it will hopefully tie up some of the loose ends from the first game - perhaps even confirming whether Reznov was just a figment of Mason's imagination after all, and confirming what happened to the other protagonists after the events of the game ended. That's a lot of balls in the air, but thankfully, Treyarch have brought in David S Goyer to oversee the script and hopefully tie the convergent strands together coherently. The developers aren't just relying simply on the script to help convey the emotional weight of the story either - the advances they have made in facial detail, and more specifically the way eyes look and react will hopefully offer a more convincing human response to the grander details of the storyline. We need to care about the characters involved, or there isn't enough at stake for the plot to work, and it seems Treyarch are doing everything they can to ensure that we can empathise.