Black Ops 2 details: Revenge Voice, killing off Last Stand and how Streaking works

[Teajunkie]

Black Ops 2 game director David Vonderhaar has coughed up a few new multiplayer details on an Activision podcast.

Let's go through the highlights, shall we?
Firstly, deathstreaks have been nobbled.
There's no Second Chance; there's no Last Stand, there's no Final Stand, Vondehaar confirmed.
"There's no combination whatsoever of perk or deathstreak that puts the guy in the "downed" state in multiplayer.



It's still used as the revival state in Zombies when you get downed.
But it's not in multiplayer - there is no perk and there are no deathstreaks, so there is no Final Stand or equivalent of it.
Absolutely not.
Please stop yelling at me.

Regular streak rewards (now handed out for objective completion and supporting actions, rather than just kills) loop round in Black Ops 2, so if you've shot your way to the top of the ladder, you can start over without dying.
It's something we are pretty happy with at this point, Vondehaar said.
It does wrap around, but you can't earn more than one of a type.

Let's say you took UAV and Counter UAV. If you earned the UAV then earned the Counter UAV, you're going to start building again for the UAV - but if you haven't spent it, if you haven't called it in or activated it, you're not going to get a second one.
You're just going to get notified that you're back at that part of the chain.

You would definitely want to activate those scorestreaks so when you loop, you'll get them again. It's not like Black Ops 1, which is they just keep going forever and you effectively have to die to loop.
You don't have to die to loop at any point; you'll just keep looping.
A new, optional feature lets you hear the last words of the last person you killed, which is certainly one more reason to wear a headset.

"It's an option that you can turn on and off in custom games.
We gave it a name - Revenge Voice. It's on in public games; we can turn it off in league play if we want.
We love that thing. It's funny.
Vondehaar also took the time to explain how unlocking stuff and Prestiging works.
You might want to skip this bit if the thought of a XP puts you to sleep. "When you start at level one, you will start leveling up and you will get to level four.

You will unlock create-a-class and you will have four unlock tokens, one for each level.
"You will then have a range of things you can spend those unlock tokens on - but not everything.
By the time you're up to level 55, you have - surprise - 55 tokens.
So along the way, you've been deciding how to spend those tokens on content that's been level-gated.
Level-gated content includes all the weapons, all the perks, all the equipment - tactical and lethal grenades - as well as the wildcards.
Those things are all level-gated and they all require tokens to unlock.



"Bam, I'm level 55, I have 55 things from anything that was available in create-a-class - but only 55, because you only get 55 tokens and there's over 100 pieces of content. That's one through 55.
"You go and you Prestige...the way we're looking at this right at this moment in time is, because you're Prestige, you can pick out one of those things and hold on to it as you continue through the Prestige progression.

So one through 55 is set in stone, we're happy with it. What we're working on right now is making sure Prestige feels just as good."
Sounds... promising? Thanks to Gameranx for the transcripts.
For an overview, read our feature on the eight most important changes introduced by Black Ops 2's multiplayer.

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