You already know that the antagonists in the next Call of Duty will be turning America's robot drone army against us. And Los Angeles gets blown the hell up. But who's got the cojones and brains to even to do such a thing? Watch the trailer and find out.

Who do you call when you want electro-tinged, industrial-inflected rock for a world gone wrong? Trent Reznor, of course. Along with groundbreaking work as a recording artist in the 1990s, Reznor's done film for both The Social Network and The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo.

And now, it's been reported in USA Today that the Oscar-winning composer and band frontman will be doing the theme music for Activision's next Call of Duty title:

"I have always looked to that franchise as the cutting edge of what seemingly unlimited budgets and full-on not cutting any corners can do in the current day and age."

The Black Ops II story envisions a new Cold War between the U.S. and China and an international villain plays them off each other. "There is a lot of reservation and angst and sense of loss and regret and anger bubbling under the surface," Reznor says. "So it didn't make sense to have a gung ho patriotic feeling kind of theme song. It has to feel weighty."

This isn't Reznor's first video game music work by a long shot. The singer also did music for Quake and was also working with Id Software on tracks and sound engineering for Doom 3 until he had to abandon the project.

Trent Reznor composes 'Call of Duty: Black Ops II' music [USA Today]

Proving once again that it pays to wait when it comes to the hottest PlayStation 3 games, today Sony is launching Ultimate Editions, a selection of hit PS3 titles bundled with all of their downloadable content for one low price. How much would you pay for complete editions of Red Dead Redemption, BioShock 2, or L.A. Noire?

They're like Game of the Year editions, only downloadable. Today through June 4, PlayStation 3 owners can hop onto the PlayStation Network and purchase more-or-less complete editions of some of the hottest older games on the console for 30 percent off what all the bits would have cost individually. For a DLC-heavy game like Motorstorm Apocalypse, scoring the whole shebang for $50.49 isn't too shabby.

Of course it's even better when you're a PlayStation Plus member. Then the bundles are 50 percent off, dropping that Call of Duty: Black Ops Ultimate Edition from $66.46 to $46.54. Maybe it's finally time I look into hooking up a year of PlayStation Plus.

Here's the full list of Ultimate Editions going up today.

• Red Dead Redemption with Legends and Killers, Liars and Cheats and Undead Nightmare — $27.99 ($19.59 for PlayStation Plus)
• InFAMOUS 2 Complete Edition — $33.99 ($23.79 for PlayStation Plus)
• BioShock 2 with Exclusive Character Pack, Minerva's Den, The Protector Trials, Rapture Metro and Sinclair Solutions — $27.99 ($19.59 for PlayStation Plus)
• MotorStorm Apocalypse — $50.49 ($35.34 for PlayStation Plus)
• Call of Duty: Black Ops with First Strike, Escalation, Annihilation and Rezurrection Packs — $66.49 ($46.54 for PlayStation Plus)
• L.A. Noire: The Complete Edition — $27.99 ($19.59 for PlayStation Plus)
• Mafia II with Betrayal of Jimmy, Greaser Pack, Jimmy's Vendetta, Joe's Adventure, Renegade Pack, Vegas Pack and Hero Pack — $20.99 ($14.69 for PlayStation Plus)
• Just Cause 2 Ultimate Edition - $20.99 ($14.69 for PlayStation Plus)
• Mortal Kombat with the Warrior Bundle and Klassic Skins Pack 1 — $34.99 ($24.49 for PlayStation Plus)

PSN Introduces Ultimate Editions [PlayStation Blog]

Activision puts out a new Call of Duty game every year. It's been that way for the last half-decade or so. Trouble is, this annualization give people a wide-open lane to complain about recycled engines and how the games all look the same.

Mark Lamia—head of Treyarch, the studio behind the Black Ops branch of COD—knows all of this and wants people to know that some the software powering the sequel won't be a complete overhaul of the tech used for 2010's Black Ops. In an interview with Activision blogger Dan Amrich, Lamia says:

Engines, each time they get touched, they change. The creators alter them; they don't modify what they don't need to, and then they alter what they need to. You can't make a competitive product if you're not upgrading that engine along the way.

So what specifically got touched? Graphics and lighting, it seems:

I think what people are asking for is for us to push. They want us to make a better-looking game; they want things. I don't think those are things people can't ask for. We asked ourselves that very same question - we wanted to advance the graphics. I think the questions are valid. The answer may not need to be an entirely new engine, but you might need to do an entire overhaul of your entire lighting system. The trick is, we're not willing to do that if we can't keep it running at 60 frames per second - but we did that this time. So this is the Black Ops II engine.

Mark Lamia discusses the Black Ops II engine
[One of Swords]

When we say "Dubstep" most people think of hard drops and grinding wubs. But there is a lot more to the genre than that.

When people think Call of Duty, they think of hard explosions and grinding machine guns. But… perhaps there's more to the genre than that?

YouTuber TomahawkTrix thinks so, anyway, with this surprisingly lovely dubstep remix of that first trailer for Black Ops II, featuring a tune from Blackmill Music.

Feels like all those other emotionally dissonant action-game trailers we've seen, only with kinda more interesting music.

So, how about that Black Ops II trailer? Pretty explosive stuff. Now that you know more about the game itself, I thought it might be fun to go through some image-grabs from the trailer, just to tell you what I'm seeing there and how it lines up with that I saw of the game last week.

Here's the cockpit of a VTOL, one of the vehicles in the game.

More VTOLs. See how they soar!

The end-result of a successful mission, this went down in-engine and was appropriately bombastic.

The name I assigned to this image is "Building Exploding." I leave it to you to determine why that is.

The name of THIS image is "Building Exploding 2." Really, this should have been the first one, since it's a better picture.

Here is a CLAW unmanned tank wrecking some shit.

Another, better shot of the CLAW. These will be controllable in the Strike Force game mode, and doubtless in the rest of the campaign as well.

Here's the protagonist hopping into the cockpit of a futuristic anti-aircraft gun.

Some VTOL dogfighting—not all of the VTOL segments are on rails.

The view from inside of one of the flying drones during a Strike Force mission.

This is how your character issues controls to drones in the single-player campaign. You don't assume direct control of them; rather, you issue waypoints and commands on the fly.

One of the unmanned drones that attacks LA. Oh, how our hubris has turned against us!

A great shot of some more drones. The evil-looking bastards.

Frank Woods, who tells the story of Black Ops II. Not looking so hot, Frank. I guess you're pretty old at this point.

Hey, it's a guy in a gas mask! Maybe it's Ghost's cousin or something.

So yes, horses. Look at the pretty horses. There will be horses in this game.

Also, soldiers.

Also, exploding terrorists.

Sometimes, the horses and the helicopters will meet.

Here's a shot of the drone attack on LA, which seems to be what kicks off the story.

Okay, now we're just into some glory-shots of LA being destroyed. Let's keep on moving...

...more LA destruction...

...and more, also a shot that sort of makes me want to play Vice City...

...Oh hey! It's Nelson. This is the guy that I have a fair hunch is played by Michael Rooker.

Here's Nelson looking at some serious wreckage. Man, look at all that wreckage.

An overhead shot of a tactical strike—unclear whether this is from the campaign (likely) or from Strike Force.

Soldiers. America. Why We Fight. Freedom. Oorah. Oscar Mike.

More or less the entire squad of a Strike Force operation—aerial drones, ground drones, and an armed squad of soldiers.

Frank Woods is scared! Don't go! Don't leave him!

...That's when the cobras come.

Last week, I headed down to visit with Treyarch in Santa Monica to get an extended look at Call of Duty: Black Ops II. Our visit was entirely hands-off, and consisted mostly of a series of in-game demos of missions from the single-player campaign, as well as a new open-ended single-player mode called "Strike Force." The in-game missions were mostly set during a drone attack of Los Angeles, but we caught a few glimpses of other sections, as well.

Rather than write a huge narrative preview, I thought I'd just cut right to the chase and list as many facts about the game as I could.

I almost hit Stephen's standing record of 50, but fell just short. Oh well! There's a reason he's the boss.

Here now, 48 facts about Call of Duty: Black Ops II. From single-player to Strike Force all the way to Multiplayer and Zombies. (Less info on those last two, unfortunately.) Buckle up. Let's start with...

The Story

• The game's story will jump between two timelines, with the primary one set in 2025. "Most" of the game will be set in 2025.
• It is a direct sequel to Black Ops.
• We will find out definitively what happened at the end of Black Ops—presumably, Mason didn't actually kill JFK, given that he's out in the field in Black Ops II. But who knows?
• The second timeline will be set in the late 80's near the end of the Cold War.
• The story will be narrated by Black Ops character Frank Woods, now an old man. Apparently he didn't die at the end of Black Ops after all.
• In the 80's timeline, players will take on the role of Black Ops protagonist Alex Mason.
• In 2025, players will take on the role of David Mason, who is the son of Alex Mason. The father/son relationship will play a part in the story. Hello daddening of video games!
• In the game's fiction, there is a second Cold War happening between China and the US due to the scarcity of Rare Earth Elements used to make tech devices and military weapons.
• The story is based on a real-world possibility, as China (according to the folks at Treyarch) currently controls 95% of the rare earth elements in the world. Topical!
• Many of the real-world hooks are inspired by P.W. Singer's Wired for War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Century.
• A good deal of the 1980's action will take place during proxy wars in Central America. Tropical!

• 

  
  
• Game Director Dave Anthony hinted that we may find out more about "imaginary" Viktor Reznov. "He was essentially a figment of the player's imagination," Anthony said.

  "Or was he?" Studio Director Mark Lamia chimed in, playfully. "Will we find out more about that?" asked Anthony with a smirk.

  
  
• David Mason (the son)'s callsign is "Section." Which is kind of a cool callsign.
• The villain will be a man named Raul Menendez, who in 2025 is pitting the Chinese and US governments against each other by hacking into their drones and other robotic weapons.
• The 1980's missions will chronicle what started Menendez on setting his current-day plans in motion.
• The story is was written from the ground up by Dark Knight and Batman Begins co-writer David Goyer. Goyer joined the first Black Ops part of the way through. He wanted to "create a memorable villain" with Menendez.
• Menendez has hacked into the US's unmanned drones and unleashed an attack on Los Angeles. In the mission we saw, a fleet of drones were destroying buildings in downtown LA.

• 

  
  

• ---

• There will be at least one female soldier in the game, a pilot named Anderson. She laid quite a bit of waste during the entire LA mission.
• The president in 2025 is also a woman, and appeared in the LA mission.
• David Mason's sidekick is a soldier named Nelson who appears to be played by Michael Rooker of Mallrats and The Walking Dead fame.
• The game will be using full-body performance capture to place its actors in the game; the tech demo I saw demonstrated both male and female actors captured with the sort of clarity we've come to expect from games using full-performance capture. James Burns will be reprising his role as Frank Woods, of course.

• 

  
  

  ---

  The Gameplay

• From what I saw in several demo sections set in a burning, futuristic LA, drones are controllable in combat and will play a large part in the game. Players have a drone-controller on their wrist in the game, and can use it to assign targets and waypoints.
• There will be horses, and horseback-riding, during at least one sequence in the 1980's. They even went so far as to bring a horse into the motion capture studio.
• At one point in the demo, the player jumped into a futuristic anti-aircraft gun and shot down enemy drones.
• Vehicle segments will be back, including one piloting a futuristic VTOL airship. Part of the VTOL mission was mostly on-rails, but the second part involved free-flying and dogfighting with drones.
• The Black Ops II story will be branching—it will feature choices and variable outcomes. Wait, what? Yep.
• At one point, players had an option to either grab a sniper rifle and cover their squad, or rappel down to join up with them. Presumably that choice leads to a slightly different gameplay experience—this looks like one of the smaller of the choices offered in the game.
• A large part of the branching will be due to Strike Force, which is a brand-new game mode featuring tactical, open-ended gameplay in sandbox-style levels.

• 

  
  

• ---

  
  

  The New Game Mode: "Strike Force"

  An in-depth look at Strike Force can be found here.

  
  
• Strike Force missions will be woven into the core single-player campaign, and will present themselves as various black ops missions available around the globe.
• Players won't be able to play all of the strike force missions in a single playthrough.
• Strike Force is currently only included in the campaign and isn't a separate mode. It won't allow for multiplayer but, at some point down the road, could be fleshed out. "Things like Zombies originally started as unlocks," said an Activision representative after we followed up to make sure. "We're not taking the option off the table."
• Depending on the outcome of a given strike force mission, the story will change. "You're going to choose a mission," said Lamia, "and that's a branch for the story. Say there's three missions out there—you're not going to go back and play all of them; the story goes on. If you die on a strike force mission, you die in the story."
• Going on that, it would seem that the playable characters don't feature in the Strike Force missions.
• Strike Force allows players to control squads of troops, giving follow/hold commands with the shoulder buttons.
• Strike Force also allows a zoomed-out command view via an unmanned aerial drone that lets you to set waypoints for your units to achieve shifting goals.
• Strike Force will allow you to control (at the very least) armed aerial drones, armed land-drones, and unarmed aerial drones in addition to being able to hop to the viewpoint of any of the soldiers in your squad.

• 

  
  

• ---

• The strike force missions will unfold organically but will be written into the story—in that way, they'll function somewhat like a single-player version of the multiplayer in Mass Effect 3.
• I think I heard Kiefer Sutherland voicing one of the squad members in Strike Force, but I'm not sure. Consider this a Kiefer! Rumor!

• 
  

  Multiplayer

• Multiplayer director David Vonderhaar relayed that the new approach they are taking is "One size does not fit all." That means, he said, that there is no one way to play a Call of Duty game. So, they're pulling back features like create-a-class, killstreaks, and other features and reexamining them, challenging their assumptions of "what cows are sacred."
• Multiplayer will take place entirely in the year 2025—there will be no multiplayer missions set in the 80's.
• They are taking the E-sports community very seriously. In part, that means that they're focusing on making the game more fun to watch as a spectator. Hopefully that means super cute, colorful uniforms!

  

  
  

• ---

• Online Director Dan Bunting took us through a tech demo of the upgraded graphics; while lighting upgrades and tech aren't usually the most interesting topics, what they were showing looked great. As they put it, they are aiming for "PC quality graphics running at 60 FPS on a console." The illusion was quite convincing.
• We saw two unpopulated multiplayer maps: The first map we saw was a naturalistic map located in a village in Yemen.
• The second map was called "Aftermath" and was set in a ruined downtown LA, presumably after the drone-attack that we saw in the demo.

• 
  

  Zombies

• Zombies will definitely be back in Black Ops II, and will feature all new modes that are more fleshed-out than ever.
• "There will be more zombies and more modes; just more."
• The zombies are "In the multiplayer engine." "If you think about all of the things we can do with our multiplayer engine," Lamia said, "You can start to think about how we might be looking at this." Okay then!
• Zombies are the only confirmed co-op aspect of Black Ops II. The campaign and strike-force modes do not appear to feature co-op.

And that's that.

48 facts about Call of Duty: Black Ops II. The final two facts will be made available as DLC.

(Just kidding.)

Everything We Know About Call of Duty: Black Ops II

We've seen the amazing new Call of Duty, and we can't wait to play it on November 13. Today, we're telling you all about it...

Every past Call of Duty game has featured a rigidly linear single-player campaign. They've gotten shorter and shorter as the years have gone by, too—the last few games have featured campaigns that have lasted merely 4-6 hours.

Treyarch is aiming to change that with Black Ops II with the inclusion of "Strike Force," a new, open-ended game-mode that's folded into the single-player campaign.

In the game's story, it's 2025. There is a cold war going on between China and the United States. In addition to the timeline-hopping story of Alex and David Mason and Frank Woods, Black Ops II's story will feature several points during which the player is given a number of different operations to undertake.

"You'll get to these points in the campaign," said Treyarch head Mark Lamia. "There'll be these hotspots around the world, as you'd expect in a cold war. And you'll get your intel drop on them and JSOC will come to you and say 'Here's what's going on. We need to drop a black ops team in. Which mission are you gonna assign your team to."

"You'll choose a mission, and that is actually a branch for the story, and the structure of the campaign." According to Lamia, if you die, that won't end the game but rather will be included as a part of the story—your characters are disposable, though the high-level narrative will (allegedly) play out differently depending on how you do in the missions. It's not clear whether the effects will be story-only or whether they'll actually have an affect on the gameplay or settings of missions in the rest of the game.

(I got the impression that the actual missions will still feel fairly separate from the Strike Force missions, and that the non-game parts of the story will be the only parts that are affected. But that's just the sense I got.)

Rather than taking on the role of any of the main characters in Strike Force, you'll more or less assume the role of the entire squad, much like in one of Ubisoft's Tom Clancy games—specifically Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter.

The missions play out over large, sandbox-y levels, which will call on players to use tactical thinking and creative problem solving to an extent we've certainly never seen in the corridor-happy Cal of Duty franchise before. It may not hit the heights of a true Tom Clancy game (particularly not a GRAW game), but it's still a big shift.

The map I saw seemed quite a bit larger than an average multiplayer map, though nowhere near as sprawling as a large Battlefield map. As you play, a series of varied, narrative-driven objectives will roll over the map.

Players will have the option of hopping between the flying Quad drone, the CLAW tank, another armored mechanized tank, and any of the members of their squad. It wasn't confirmed whether there will be more units available than that in the finished game.

Lamia referred to the view from on high as "overwatch mode," which you can use to set up any sort of tactic you'd like to assign your team from a mobile camera looking over the battlefield. Lamia said that the objectives in a given Strike Force mission will always be the same, but "how you take on that objective, that's up to you."

The Strike Force mission I watched took place in Singapore—the goal was to hack into three electron lasers that need to be taken out in order to clear the way for a gunship. Despite that samey-feeling setup—how many times in these games have we fought our way to a control point?—watching Strike Force play out really didn't feel much like watching a Call of Duty single-player level. The player kept switching control between his drones and his squad, and it felt and looked much more like Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter than Modern Warfare II.

The amount of replayability and choice that Lamia described appears to be about on par with any other tactical shooter—if you want, you can try some different tactics in a scenario and see how it plays out. It remains to be seen how well Call of Duty's AI will hold up when given a much bigger scenario to handle. Good artificial intelligence will go a long way towards making the Strike Force missions truly feel worth playing more than once.

It's worth keeping in mind that the main reason this is a big deal is that… well, Call of Duty is a big deal. On its face, Strike Force doesn't offer anything dramatically different than a years-old Tom Clancy game. It just happens to be included in a COD game. In fact, I didn't see any sort of stealth options, or very reactive AI—they just came in waves and opened fire.

With that said, it's nice to see Treyarch taking steps to shake up the Call of Duty formula somewhat. It certainly could do with some shaking! And as Activision's spokesperson took great pains to point out, the zombies mode also started as a limited, unlockable feature, and it's now got its own entire section of the game.

The action-movie blast-blast-blast-and-done formula of the past few Call of Duty single-player campaigns, while still financially marketable, has started to feel a bit stale. More than that, it's started to feel like a missed opportunity to really cater to players who want a great single-player experience and don't care about multiplayer.

Strike Force's tactical gameplay will require a lot more thinking than your average Call of Duty mission, and a little bit of brains could well go a long way.

Want to know more about Black Ops II? Why, head on over to our handy fact sheet.

Everything We Know About Call of Duty: Black Ops II

We've seen the amazing new Call of Duty, and we can't wait to play it on November 13. Today, we're telling you all about it...

Here it is, folks—the first trailer for Call of Duty: Black Ops II.

As you can see, the game will take place in the future. And in the past! The military has come to rely on a huge force of unarmed drones and tanks, and some nefarious so-and-so has hacked them and turned them against us.

Black Ops regular Frank Woods returns as an old man to tell the story, which begins with Los Angeles under drone attack. Stick around for a whirlwind tour of airplane cockpits, horseback riding, and a sweet Michael Bay glory-shot of a helicopter flipping over some cars on a highway.

This sure does tick all the Call of Duty checkboxes. Check back at midnight tonight, when we'll have a bunch more details about the game.

Evidence continues to mount that a Call of Duty: Black Ops sequel is oscar mike.

First there was an Amazon listing. Then there was an odd blackballing. Then, there was what looked to be a Black Ops 2 teaser poster surfaced—after that, a GameStop teaser website. Now?

Now, a photo depicting the game's box art has hit the internet. The box art does resemble the silhouetted art on the teaser site; however, it is of a higher resolution.

The box shows the European version of the game. In Italian, the front says, "Prenota Subito" or "Reserve Now". In the corner, it adds notes, "One Per Customer."

The photo does send off all sorts of warning bells: there's a convenient lens flare, which is a technique fakers use to pass off phony games; the game box looks like a PS2 case and not an Xbox 360 box.

Yet, the font matches up with the new Call of Duty font for the new CoD, and the picture does depict a high-resolution image of the image teased on the GameStop page. And that image shows Call of Duty: Black Ops 2.

Supposed promotional Black Ops 2 case. [Twitter Thanks, Elite-T-Rex!]