Specialists to bring "moments of brilliance" to Black Ops 3

We caught up with Treyarch's David Vonderhaar during E3 and fired a variety of questions at Black Ops 3's game design director. One topic of conversation was the new Specialist classes that are coming to the game's multiplayer. Here's how they work as explained by Vonderhaar:

"So when you pick a Specialist you have to make a deliberate choice between the specialist weapon or the specialist ability. So I'll give you one example from the nine, I'll use Seraph who's one of my favourites. Seraph has this really insane hand cannon called the Annihilator, a one-shot hand cannon with extreme bullet penetration; that's her power weapon.

"On the other side you can take her ability which is combat focus; you activate that then you're bonusing out against score streaks as a multiplier. You have to make that choice.

"Now as you're playing you're building up the meter, right, and as you earn score you're accelerating that - it does not reset on death - once you earn it you get the notification noise, you'll see the flashing in the HUD... then you press the bumpers at the same time, then you've activated it.

"Then you get that brief moment to shine, but do not think for a second this is free kills, because it doesn't change your health in anyway... You still have to really work with that, it's not free. But if you have a moment of brilliance with it you feel really good. Games are supposed to be fun; let's have some fun."

Vonderhaar then explained how the new Specialist classes will work alongside and, in some cases, in tandem with the existing customisation features that are already part of the Black Ops makeup.

"It has no bearing on Create-a-Class," the design director said when explaining how it's not a one or the other choice. "Create-a-Class is there. Pick 10 is there. You have your Specialist and Create-a-Class, and you have Pick 10. So you're still choosing the class you want, which attachments, what Perks you want or not, how you're going to use your ten allocation to actually do it. And you still pick three score streaks.

"So it works in tandem with that, in fact, if you pay a lot of attention - and people will discover this when the game is out and people have more time with it - is there is complimentary components. Each Specialist has kind of a core theme, like Ruin is a rusher, for example. And there's things in the Perks system which helps that scenario, so there's interesting combinations of how you use your Create-a-Class and Pick 10 allocation with the Specialist to amp up, or complement or supplement something that she's not so good at or he's not so good at."

Call of Duty: Black Ops 3 is set to launch on PC, PS3, PS4, Xbox 360 and Xbox One on November 6. The game's new Zombies campaign has just been detailed at Comic-Con, and you can read more about that by hitting this link.