With the return of Dedicated Servers and Modtools, I and the entire community were very happy and hopeful that with Black Ops we could relive the peak of Call of Duty that we had in COD4. But despite a promising start, modtools was always very limited, and we couldn’t even make our own maps, and to make matters worse, dedicated servers were only possible by renting them exclusively from GameServers, and to destroy all our dreams, when mods were created they made the servers unranked.
While I was still dreaming that everything would be solved, I initially created a basic version of Frontlines, solving all the bizarre balance and gameplay issues that the original game had, and so Black Frontlines was born in 2010, with a unique full release in May 22 2012 for the public exclusively on ModDB.
After everything was solved, I started working on the expansions as I had done with COD4, but I ran into many bizarre limitations with even a very low number of variables that could be created, and as a result the mod could never expand much.
The only thing that really made me happy was that Quake‘s bot functions had been reincorporated into the core game, despite coming with extremely stupid bots that were limited to only playing Team Deathmatch in offline matches. In other words, they didn’t fulfill any objective, they just walked around the map and shot.
I initially ported this code to Multiplayer and expanded it into what at the time was considered the best bots in Call of Duty history. They became much more intelligent, they fulfilled all the objectives, in addition to everything else involved, such as a medic saving an injured friend, performing AirStrikes with precision, etc. Really everything that involves combat in a multiplayer COD match.
Since I didn’t have much space to create, I focused on what was getting the most attention in the original Frontlines, the Help Mode and the Paratroopers. Since there were no custom maps, I would always know which maps I would play, so programming the parachute drops was much simpler, since in the original they were programmed to adapt to any type of map that would be made in the future, which was a chaos to do.
Here in Black Frontlines, I programmed the drops according to each map, although completely random like in Frontlines. And for that I ported the first Frontlines Gametype with parachutes and which was already a huge success, the Airborne.
With everything working perfectly and without many conditions to create another new gametype due to limitations, I started to evolve only what was already ready, and thus Airborne Mode was born, where all existing gametypes could be played in two ways, with or without parachutes, which changed the gameplay a lot, giving new life to the game, and practically doubling the number of gametypes in the game.
To top it off, Coop Modes were created, from the basic multiplayer to the brand new Coop Missions, which created dynamic missions within the multiplayer maps. In addition, Squad Mode was created, the first Squad system in the Call of Duty history.
Even as a single release, Black Frontlines was a complete success, receiving incredible reviews with very high scores and appearing on the list of the best mods of the year by the ModDB editors.
Since then, it has been considered by far the best Black Ops mod in history, winning every year since its release as the best Black Ops mod, and remaining to this day, more than a decade later, as the most popular and highest-rated mod in Black Ops History.
ModDB Page
On ModDB you can check the entire development history of Black Frontlines and more details.
Gameplays
In this playlist you can watch several online gameplays since the earlier development days.
Reviews
