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. Â 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.
Published: Jul 1, 2011 11:00 pm