Call of Duty: Black Ops III lets you ban weapons
Here are the changes and additions to the game's e-sports features.
During its Gamescom event today, Activision revealed some information about Call of Duty: Black Ops III's e-sports support.
The game has expectedly robust integrated e-sports features, and developer Treyarch is working on some significant improvements to them. The studio announced a new multiplayer system called the "Ban and Protect System." It's up on competitive and private matches, and it works by letting each player pick an item to vote to either "ban" or "protect" before each match.
These items include Black Ops III's items, types of perks, and other game-affecting features. During a game, players banned gunsights, grenades, and guns themselves. They picked strategically -- if they know an opposing player relies on a certain gun, the other team will ban that gun. If you protect an item, then you'll get access to it even if another player bans it for everyone else.
In competitive games, there's another system in play called Specialist Draft. This introduces a restriction on the number of Specialist abilities in a single match. If one player chooses a specific ability, they are the only one who gets to use that skill on their team during the match.
Both Specialist Draft and the Ban and Protect System are designed to introduce balance into competitive games, while also making that balancing fair for every player.
Black Ops III launches on November 6 for Xbox One, Xbox 360, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 3, and PC. You can check out our hands-on impressions of the game's multiplayer here.
Keep an eye on GameSpot for more news from Gamescom all of this week.