Download and play the Call of Duty: Black Ops Annihilation Map Pack and you’ll see pretty quickly that alot of work was put into the level design for the new maps. David Vonderhaar thinks that this represents Treyarch’s growing skill as level designers, as he iterated in a recent interview.
“We’re very concerned about pathing through the map. You want to make sure players can navigate the map in a consistent fashion. You want your main paths, to say, be wider than your flanking paths – tell a vocabulary in a visual story there,” “And what we’ve learned over time is that we weren’t always good at that.”
“ We’ve gotten better at that and it’s become just part of our D.N.A. … So you’re seeing in the map packs this evolution of our thinking, and Annihilation represents exactly what we’re talking about here. … I think anything Treyarch does long-term will be more cognizant of it.”
The Annihilation Map Pack is available now on the Xbox Live Marketplace.