Treyarch pulls Nuketown 2025 playlist from Black Ops II matchmaking

One of the biggest releases of the year - Call of Duty: Black Ops II - is mostly famous for its multiplayer mode. The pre-order bonus for the game included the Nuketown 2025 map, along with a double XP weekend. According to Eurogamer, Treyarch has pulled the Nuketown 2025 / 24-7 playlist from the game's matchmaking options.

The news was confirmed on Twitter by the game's design director David Vonderhaar. "Double XP weekend is official over. That means Nuketown 2025 / 24-7 is as well. I know. RIGHT? Don't kill the messenger," he tweeted. After seeing the outcry from fans, he tweeted, "Nuketown 2025 / 24-7 will be back for special events. You can always play it with your friends in Custom Games."

The future is black for fans of Nuketown 2025

To replace this, Treyarch has added a new playlist to the game's matchmaking options called the Chaos Moshpit. Much like the Nuketown 2025 playlist, the Chaos Moshpit playlist is only available to those who pre-ordered the game. The playlist has the maps Carrier, Cargo, Express, Hijacked, Slums, Standoff and Nuketown 2025 in the rotation.

Recently, it was revealed that Black Ops II made $500 million in the first 24 hours of its release. For the sake of comparison, one of the biggest games for the Xbox 360, the recently released Halo 4, saw about $220 million in sales on its first day. Though, this could be attributed to the fact that Halo 4 is an Xbox 360 exclusive release, whereas Black Ops II was released for all gaming platforms.

This is par for the course when it comes to sales of games in the Call of Duty franchise. In 2011, Activision had reported $400 million worth of sales for the last year's Call of Duty game - Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3. The Call of Duty series has always seen record breaking sales since the release of Modern Warfare 2 back in 2009.

A few days before the game's release, it was revealed that the PC version of Black Ops II will have its FoV locked to a maximum of 80 degrees. The Treyarch community manager @pcdev had tweeted, “And don't ask me to raise the FOV cap. Max is 80. Thankyouverymuch. <3, -pcdev”. When users asked Pcdev the reason for the FOV cap, he replied that technical limitations were stopping Treyarch, otherwise it would have increased the cap just to prevent a backlash from fans. FOVs are generally locked because of the hardware limitations of gaming consoles, as the consoles have problems streaming high-resolution textures in a game. The FOV is locked so that less in-game area is visible, and hence, less in-game area needs to be streamed. Games on the PC don’t generally have the same problem as the hardware on gaming PCs is leagues ahead in terms of power than that on gaming consoles, and hence, have no problems streaming more high-resolution textures.

This is a big deal when it comes to first person shooters because the FOV determines how much you can see in the first person view. While FPS games on consoles are usually capped at 60-65 degrees because of the hardware limitations of the systems, this isn’t a problem because players are generally far enough away from the screen for the FOV to be right. When playing a PC game, players are generally much closer to the screen and require an increased FOV to avoid feeling nauseous due to tunnel vision.