"Call of Duty: Black Ops 2" is easily one of the highly-anticipated games of the year. At the Eurogamer Expo, Treyarch design director David Vonderhaar elaborated on the upcoming game's newly-introduced prestige system.
The Prestige Edition of the game is set to include 55 levels in the main progression and 10 levels of prestige. Similar to the previous games in the series, when in the prestige system, the game's mechanics give users the option to reset their level back to level one.
However, unlike previous COD games, while in prestige, gamers will not lose all of the content they unlocked. For example, weapon experience will remain and when the gamer unlocks a weapon again, the game will remember the progress that was made previously while using the weapon.
"In Black Ops 2 prestige is not a start over system. When you prestige in Black Ops it will not reset your weapon levelling. If you are level four on a gun you will still be level four when you cycle back around to that gun. Same with all your cosmetics, any camo you've unlocked or emblem, all the personalisation, all the fancy backgrounds you managed to achieve, all of that will still be there," stated Vonderhaar.
Vonderhaar said that the company has been thinking how it is possible to direct more gamers towards the new system, and admitted that the previous steps taken to generate traffic (by introducing rewards, which was later rectified) were all wrong.
"I've been thinking about it non-stop, about how to get people to prestige. We kept going about it the wrong way. We kept saying, here are some more rewards if you do it. Here is this extra stuff if you decide to hit the prestige button," averred Vonderhaar.
Vonderhaar also showed the 10 "Black Ops 2" prestige icons on the big screen. This showing was the first instance that all the icons were shown publicly. Vonderhaar concluded that when "you finish up the prestige you become the prestige master."
"Call of Duty: Black Ops 2" is currently set for a November release on current generation consoles and PC.
