“Wait, what?”

Obviously a news piece coming with a certain degree of shock and awe, Activision’s Director of Communications, John Rafacz, has disclosed some surprising information. Black Ops 2, as assuring declared by Rafacz, will lack a branching single player storyline and will guarantee that all partakers to Black Ops 2 single player campaign will “share a similar single player campaign experience.”

Much news has been withdrawn from Activision’s tight lips concerning their new take and flow onto the single player campaign and seemingly implied the outcome of your missions truly had a sort of effect on the outcome of the rest of the storyline. Alongside these decisions are Strike Force missions, new to the franchise’s single player campaign, which many thought would irrevocably play a pivotal role in shaping different storyline conclusions. Rafacz has revealed, too, that these Strike Force missions ultimately “shapes the fiction around the ending.” The underlying purpose in the introduction of Strike Force missions is to simply usher in a break from the norm of which is Call of Duty single player and give the player a chance to indulge in a more tactical point of control in Call of Duty. Effectively this is Activision’s and Treyarch’s parry of non-linearity.

What is your take on this? Were you expecting something a little different from Black Ops 2′s repertoire? In my opinion this is somewhat ridiculous. In Treyarch’s effort to avoid non-linearity, they’re practically still hitting linearity right in the face. If there is only one outcome, one storyline, one way to get to that single outcome, then to me that is a linear storyline. Diverting an audience for a Strike Force mission or two where failure or success is irrelevant doesn’t warrant Black Ops 2′s campaign as non-linear. I’m quite disappointed at Black Ops 2′s storyline, but then again I am practically purchasing the title to play Zombies.