19. Choice and Consequence
War is bad - that's much is to be taken for granted - and terrible things tend to happen. Instead of sitting back and watching them, a pawn in a grander game that you ultimately have no control over, Black Ops 2 is set to bring in more elements of role-playing games, and making your choices matter more to what happens in the game. The game will ask you to take care of your fellow soldiers, making decisions that could have very real consequences for their well-being and giving you a good deal more responsibility for your actions. That immediately convinces that Treyarch are more invested in making their game more interactive than Modern Warfare 3, which was a triumph of presentation and aesthetic, but which couldn't match its surface with enough substance to make the campaign anything other than a reasonable diverting, but mostly hollow experience. The market has been crying out for a game that blends the best bits of Mass Effect and the slick presentation of Call of Duty (though with more immersive gameplay in the campaign), and hopefully Black Ops 2 will cater precisely to that gap in the market. Such a potential development might also mean that Treyarch have focused their attentions less on the more commercially valuable casual gamer market, and more on deeper gameplay, and that can only be a good thing.