Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 is dipping into the future of war, with high-tech toys that are still likely decades away. A mini-documentary series argued that the depiction is a fairly reasonable look at the future, though it spoke mostly about software hacking as a weapon. The game features plenty of hardware too, and Treyarch studio head Mark Lamia has talked about how they're grounding the drones in reality.

"We try to look at the future in the same way we look at the past," Lamia told AusGamers. "The past has to be as authentic and plausible enough to be able to set you into our fiction, and we look at that when we're doing out [sic] future." He said that to serve this end, the team came up with a "justification and storyline" for all of the pieces of new tech they introduce.

As an example, he used a sniper rifle that can see through walls, and mentioned the TSA scanners that use millimeter wave technology. Then he cited Moore's Law, which states that computer processing power doubles roughly every two years. "So you project that out. Go back to the millimeter wave technology; processing power continues. We also know that as time advances, form factors get smaller. We know that from our own personal consumer electronics devices -- they’re all smaller, things get more efficient."

Following this to its logical end leads to the sniper rifle weapon. "Does that exist right now? No. Does the other weapon exist right now? No. But every single one of those things has a backstory."

Going back to current hardware, Lamia promises that PC players will have an stand-out experience for their chosen platform. The team is optimizing for for DX11, and a proprietary anti-cheat system. "We're doing all kinds of advancements on the graphics engine that is going to, I think, yield great results if you've invested in a new rig. I think the flip side of that is, if you have a rig that's been around for a couple of years, that's fine too. Because we're actually trying to make it play really great on a wide variety of systems."