Call of Duty: Black Ops Message Board older than one year ago

Featuring all-new maps including Kowloon, Discovery, Berlin Wall and more!

We're just about two weeks away from the sure-to-be blockbuster (and temporarily exclusive) release of First Strike, the first map pack for Call of Duty: Black Ops, and to celebrate Activision's created a video preview detailing everything your $15 gets you. Treyarch Online Director Dan Bunting promises "more verticality" and "more sniper opportunities" in these new multiplayer maps, titled Kowloon (it has ziplines!), Discovery (it has a collapsible bridge!), Berlin Wall (you can figure this one out), and Stadium (built for run-and-gun).

Not on display in this video: the new zombie map, Ascension. But don't worry, with the hype-train still two weeks from its destination, we don't think that stop is too far off.

#clips Zip-lines, collapsing ice bridges and auto-turrets are all coming to Call of Duty: Black Ops multiplayer next month, if you game on an Xbox 360. More »

Call of Duty reigns supreme.

Although it comes as little surprise, Call of Duty: Black Ops was the best-selling game in the UK last year. The UK Interactive Entertainment Association's 2010 bestsellers list features the usual suspects, with Black Ops, FIFA 11 and Just Dance occupying the top three spots, respectively, across all platform sales.

Breaking it down by format, Blops landed in the top sales spot for Xbox 360 and PS3 games, while Just Dance and its sequel filled the first and third positions among Wii releases, naturally. Professor Layton And The Lost Future took the golden picarat for DS and FIFA 11 charged to the top of the charts on PSP.

Although one could speculate as to why Black Ops wasn't at the front line of PC sales in the UK, it's just as fitting that Football Manager 2011 and 2010 occupied the forward spots in the region. Check out the complete breakdown by format after the jump.

Reason #7 – You never stop reloading Doesn’t matter what FPS I’m playing…I always spend too much time reloading. Actually, it’s any game where you have a gun. I always want to make sure I have a full clip when I come into a tough situation. That means I usually end up making [...]

The UK video game market withstood a 13 percent sales decline in 2010 from 2009, according to The Association for UK Interactive Entertainment's annual report. UKIE put total software and hardware sales at £2.875 billion ($4.8 billion) in the territory last year, with console games alone accounting for £1.45 billion ($2.26 billion) of the total gross.

The Xbox 360 and PS3 were the only hardware platforms to see sales growth, with the 360 accounting for £232 million ($361 million) in sales from 18.2 million consoles sold (thanks price break!), and the PS3 just below that figure with £229 million ($357 million) in sales from 13.8 million units. UKIE didn't share specific numbers for handhelds or the Wii, though its report notes the total revenue for console hardware sales amounted to £800 million ($1.25 billion) in 2010.

Of course, key product releases helped sell those consoles -- the biggest undoubtedly being Call of Duty: Black Ops, which smashed UK sales records upon launch. Kinect and PlayStation Move presumably aided sales growth for their respective consoles, too, though UKIE didn't detail the specific fiscal impact of either in its report.

#rumor Call of Duty publisher Activision has been talking about new ways to make even more money from its shoot 'em up cashcow for years. A new report makes it sound like a new way to play Call of Duty online is imminent. More »

#activision Lending weight to CEO Bobby Kotick's claim that Call of Duty is as much a social networking phenomenon as it is a video gaming one, Activision released numbers boasting of online time that, per user, surpasses the Facebook average. More »

Super Mario Galaxy 2, Dante's Inferno take top console spots.

#screengrab If you thought playing Call of Duty: Black Ops online was tough, imagine how hard it is for the wives and children of those constantly dying soldiers. Check out more letters from the Call of Duty front at Dorkly. More »

#activision Not only is Call of Duty: Black Ops one of the fastest selling video games of all time, racking up more than a billion dollars in sales in 2010, it's also impressively enough one of the most illegally downloaded. More »

#activision Speaking to CNN earlier this week, Activision's CEO noted that more people play Black Ops, daily, than watch the late night hosts Leno, Letterman and Fallon, combined. No offense, but that would seem to be an easy goal to beat. More »

YouTube sensation Freddie Wong's gun-filled videos have referenced FPS games in the past, but none have been quite so on the nose as "Future First Person Shooter." One could almost suspend their disbelief to think these are just really good graphics -- especially once the teabagging begins.

Are you a Black Ops player on PS3? Have you been experiencing unreliable parties? How about loud mouths in the lobby -- or worse: in your unreliable party? Well, this probably isn't the game for you.

Nevertheless, Treyarch continues to make amends for those who are less thick-skinned. At approximately o-five-hundred hours ET this morning, the developer deployed another Black Ops multiplayer patch -- 1.05, for those keeping count -- through PlayStation Network. The update implements several fixes, including "improved party reliability" (when leaving with party), mute functionality in pre-game lobbies and kick functionality in party and private match lobbies. (The full patch notes are posted after the break.)

Additionally, Treyarch is continuing its work to further improve party reliability, but in the interim we suggest you try making new friends. Future patches may also address the reported "infinite loading screen" issue (which definitely sounds like some shady MK-ULTRA side effect) and a rare game-freezing scenario that can be triggered by "explosions occurring simultaneously in a concentrated area" -- see? Didn't everyone say the Cold War-authentic ice bombs would break the game?

In other Black Ops news, mod tools are in development for the PC community. So, for real, someone make that ice bomb!

[Thanks, Jason]

We recognize that the odds of you being a consummate Call of Duty: Black Ops player that hasn't dipped into the game's online multiplayer offerings are slim indeed, but we still thought we'd share -- Activision will host a free Xbox Live multiplayer weekend for the game early next year. Any Silver subscribers who pop into the game from January 28 - 30 will be able to play against other worldwide soldiers at no cost.

Of course, this promotion is only set up to reel in as many suckers as humanly possible before Activision fires off the game's "First Strike" add-on pack February 1. Or, in military terms, Activision's creating a choke point, and drawing all the outsiders into it with jelly beans. Military-grade jelly beans.

There's a song in every heart and a smile on every face. A magic sort of joy permeates the air, seeming to make every light twinkle just a bit brighter. It's the most magical time of the year ... at Activision. That's right, it's time to count the Call of Duty money! Don't be surprised if this year's festivities take us into the new year, though, as the company announced that its latest iteration, Call of Duty: Black Ops, has brought in One. Billion. Dollars. The only other entertainment product in history to get the big B this quickly? James Cameron's Avatar.

Sometimes, it can be hard to visualize amounts this large, so here's some perspective to help you understand just how much a billion dollars is: Any person on our staff would kill you in cold blood for a thousandth of it.

Happy holidays!

Activision continues to see record sales.

The new Zombie map sold in the $15 Call of Duty: Black Ops "First Strike" expansion will be called Ascension, according to an Activision press release. Any theories on what that means? First Strike will be available for Xbox 360 download on Feb 1; other platforms later. More »

#callofduty The first downloadable content for Call of Duty: Black Ops has been revealed. It'll go on sale on the Xbox 360 on February 1, and cost $15. More »

The Major Nelson podcast brings the first details of the initial, inevitable Call of Duty: Black Ops map pack. "First Strike" will be released on Xbox Live on February 1, 2011 -- as a timed exclusive, so give it about a month if you want it on another platform. The pack includes four competitive maps: "Discovery," based on the Reznov mission; "Kowloon" set in, of course, Kowloon, this time on rooftops; "Berlin Wall," a fight at Checkpoint Charlie; and "Stadium," set in an American hockey rink. It also includes a Zombie map, "Ascension."

The DLC will sell for 1200 Microsoft Points ($15), the customary Call of Duty map pack price point.

[Thanks to everyone who sent this in!]

Whatever you do: "Please do not delete your save data," pleaded Treyarch community manager Josh Olin on the Black Ops Forums late last night, "as it will not have an effect on network connectivity." Olin (a.k.a. JD_2020) was posting to discredit a rumor that doing so would fix network connectivity issues that have plagued the PS3 version of the game since Tuesday's patch.

Olin confirmed that a hotfix was released at approximately 12:30AM ET last night and claimed it's "the reason many users have experienced improved connectivity" (and not the deletion of save data). While this fix hasn't solved the issues entirely, Treyarch is "working hard to track down the cause" and will continue to release more hotfixes, according to Olin, "so stay tuned."

Follow Olin on Twitter for the most current updates.

Contrarian Corner takes on Black Ops.