Changing Killstreaks

For my first real post, I thought I should talk about something a lot of people are familiar with. Killstreaks are fairly commonplace these days and considering the fact that Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 was finally unveiled a few short hours ago, I figured where better to start?

Now if you aren’t familiar with that way killstreaks work in Call of Duty, here’s a very brief run down.

1. Player chooses killstreaks to use in game. Let’s use the UAV for example purposes.
2. Game starts.
3. Player kills a set amount of enemies without dying. In this case 3.
4. UAV becomes available to player.

It’s simple really. The player then has that killstreak available to them until they use it and then it has to be earned again. This is by no means a bad way to handle the mechanic and they did make changes in the most recent Call of Duty in order to help balance things out, I just thought it might be fun to see if improvements could be made.

One of the most common complaints I hear from my Call of Duty playing friends is that too many people camp out in certain areas of the map because they are only concerned with earning their next big killstreak. In deathmatch modes this isn’t really a problem since you’re just trying to kill the enemy but in objective based modes, it can hurt the overall team experience. So it got me thinking that we need a way to get players to want to move around the map. These types of players don’t care about the objective. They’re lone wolf types, so their killstreaks are their objective. So let’s try to kill two birds with one stone here. We can tweak the killstreak system and have it work in a way to help the camping situation.

So what is this magical solution? We split off the really desirable killstreaks into their own group, which is time-based. That may sound confusing at first but stay with me on this. Basically, what we’ll end up with is two types of killstreaks. In the first group, everything will act exactly like it’s set up in the most recent iteration of Call of Duty. This will be the group for things like the UAV and other lower-tier killstreaks. In the second group, killstreaks will be earned by killing enemies in quick succession. This will be the group for things like the Osprey Gunner, Chopper Gunner, etc. So how would we make this work? I say it needs to be kept simple and easy to understand, so here it goes (since regular killstreaks will still work the same as above, I’ll only focus this list on the new style).

1. Player has chosen the Osprey Gunner for their second group killstreak. Let’s say this will require 6 kills.
2. Game starts.
3. Player kills their first enemy.
4. Timer starts.
5. The player now has to kill another enemy before the timer runs out.
6. If they kill the required amount of enemies before the timer runs out then they earn their killstreak.

On paper, this sounds like it could keep the lone wolf style players out and running around like we want them to. Everyone will still have the ability to earn killstreaks by racking up kills without dying but this would add a new dynamic to the game. Players would be almost frantic trying to find that next enemy to shoot so that they can keep their timer running. Lone wolf players would want/need to be closer to objectives so that they’re close to the action and can get those desirable killstreaks, which should help the entire team’s experience.

Again, this all sounds good on paper and it’s hard to really say whether or not it would work without playtesting it but I think it’s a good start. How about you?