This time though, the weight of expectation on the development studio is unprecedented, prompting Treyarch to shift the action to a new location and era in Vietnam, presenting the opportunity for a host of fresh deniable ops, an arsenal of new weaponryand more.

We caught up with Treyarch Community Manager, Josh Olin, at Gamescom last week to ask a few questions about Call of Duty: Black Ops and how the shadow of MW2 has influenced development. Find out what measures Treyarch is taking for Black Ops' multiplayer, the advantages of adopting a Hollywood approach for single-player, the game's new RC cars, zombies and much, much more.

First off, is there going to be a multiplayer beta for Black Ops?

It's possible. We're just not sure. We've had betas in the past, we know the value of a beta, we know the risks of a beta and we also know it's popular and that people like that, so if we do decide to do it and you want to be the first to know, follow the game on Twitter or via the Facebook page. Those are the best ways to get that information.

I don't think they're critical. You're never going to get enough beta testing in-house and once the game is released, if a million people play one hour each game, the game's already got more testing than any QA (quality assurance) department can ever do and so some people might say that's a reason to have a beta. A lot of the hacks, glitches and exploits that were found with MW 2 weren't necessarily because it was a bad product or because it didn't have a beta. It was just because that's when all the console modding happened about a year, a year and a half ago. So, World at War was as vulnerable to those things, it just didn't seem nearly as prolific because Modern Warfare 2 was the game to play in 2009, right?

Console modding – and I don't want to get too into techno speak here – is basically hacking the system and then gaining access to system-level variables that developers never intended for people to have access to, and we always assumed we were safe because the platform was safe and secure, but it got cracked. With Black Ops, that's all behind us. We know how they did that, so we have worked in preventative measures for all the current-day modding geeks were using to exploit the Call of Duty games. Then moving forward of course, they're very intuitive, they're very creative, smart people, these hackers, so they'll probably find some way around the blocks and if they do we've built-in security tools to allow us to enforce our policies and moderate our leaderboards and lobbies, so it shouldn't be as big an issue with Black Ops.

Can you tell us roughly how many hours of gameplay the single-player campaign will have?

No, because it's just not done yet, but there is a sweet spot. We don't want the game to be too long, because then people lose their attention span and then they just never finish it. They put it down or by the time they get round to it, they can't remember how it started. So there's problems in having a game that's too long and of course the problem with having a game that's too short, is people will feel like they didn't get enough, but there is a sweet spot where you want people to feel like they want more, but they also feel like they experienced a great story. That's the sweet spot we're going to try to hit and whatever the length ends up as, we're going to try to tell the perfect story that we want to tell, with all the right pacing. Pacing a story is critical and that influences and is influenced by the length of the game.

The RC cars seem to detract slightly from the traditional Treyarch Call of Duty game, so how did they come about conceptually?

There are a lot of these really unique weapons that were made available to these Black Ops teams, so you see that in movies all the time where it's a camera attached to a car and it blows up, right? It's in Bad Boys 2 and plenty of movies do that sort of thing, and that does really happen. They do attach explosives to remote-controlled cars and that happens in war. They attach explosives to much worse things than RC cars, believe me. So, it was a fun way to do some vehicle elements in multiplayer and of course the Prestige Edition item that we made out of that - announced just last week – has a fully-functioning RC car - minus the explosives - that you'll be able to drive around and it has a 200-foot range and it wirelessly transmits video and audio back to the receiver, so it's the true surveillance vehicle.

Activision came to us and said that we're doing another Prestige Edition for Black Ops and we need to find something in the game that's cool, that people would want, so we toyed around with a lot of things. We were going to go with one of those little remote-controlled helicopters at one point, as there's a helicopter in the game, but it just wasn't as cool and we looked at the modified RC car we had in the game and thought this would be a cool toy. How many people would like to drive the car into another room and... Who knows the kind of nefarious purposes we're going to find for this car, but it should be interesting because it's got video. People can create all sorts of different viral videos with all that stuff.

That's a good question. Maybe we'll package explosives with it, I don't know. A working crossbow.

It's four-player online co-op or two-player local splitscreen. That's pretty much all I can say, but it's going to be a fan favourite.

Will the World at War zombie maps packaged with the Hardened and Prestige editions be available in Germany this time?

Yeah. The biggest entertainment launch in history, right? With every Call of Duty game, the goal is to ratchet that up more and raise the bar one level higher, so that's a big ratchet, but we're in a good position to do just that. But I've got to defer to you guys though to let us know if we've made a great game and ratcheted the bar up a level.

Does it get hard making these action set-pieces, because you don't want to be repeating the same scenarios over and over?

Can you tell us more about Black Ops' video editor, or is that another thing we'll see more of on September 1st?

That falls under the September 1st thing, but of course the teaser trailer has been ripped apart and dissected and right at the end, you guys accurately picked up that there's some sort of recording stuff in the game and I can just tell you that it's a big feature and you're going to learn a lot more about it on September 1st.

Were the Call of Duty subscription rumours frustrating for you guys?

That's why I diffused it when those rumours really started to get out of control and everybody started clamouring onto it, I just had to get a tweet out about it. So, I talked to our PR guys and they were like, “No. No no no no no. You do not have to pay to play Black Ops multiplayer. You buy the game, you put in the disc and you can play multiplayer all you want.”

Is it at all possible that Black Ops will support DLC for the game's other modes outside multiplayer?

Anything is possible. With World at War we did co-op stuff as well, so that's another possibility. There's a lot of stuff we could do through DLC, but who knows what the future holds with that.

Going back to the subscription stuff for a minute, a lot of analysts are saying that it might be a viable business option to charge for multiplayer in the future. Do you see that happening in the future from a personal standpoint?

What's your personal opinion on EA's 'Project Ten Dollar' initiative to combat sales of used games?

It'll be interesting to see how it works. Used games do pose a problem to the development community. As we become more and more prolific and our industry grows, I think we need to have more standards and policies in place to ensure that the creative authors of that content are paid their dues.