To outsiders, game design is like an iceberg: the part you can see is a tiny fraction of the monstrosity beneath. thought and assets are in circulation for years, from scribbled aside on arm kick through texture map to full-blown geometrical assets, the vast majority destined for the scrapheap, unknown region and unsung by fan of the final product.

Which is why it’s so fascinating when on. such abandoned concept or attack comes to visible radiation Take the two political campaign degree Treyarch showed off at its phone call of Duty: Black Ops event in capital of the United Kingdom this week One of them’s called ‘Slaughterhouse’, and is set in Vietnamese chromaticity urban center It is, as most previewers agree, quite the workout in single participant craftmanship. But it was first built for multiplayer.

Treyarch’s studio Head mark Lamia dropped the point in an extensive schmooze ‘Often times what we’ve done is we’ve created a single participant environment and we’ve modified it for multiplayer,’ he said. ‘But a flock of it’s been the other way round. The slaughterhouse city level was initially created interior of multiplayer. It’s different in the single participant experience, but the point is it started there.’

According to Community managing director Josh Olin. the tasty-looking stealing crossbow you’re handed in ‘WMD’ also originated in multiplayer. Such reversal of the norm are an indication, lamia told us, of how ‘aggressive’ Treyarch is being with Black Ops online.

‘I think mountain has gone into our map development,’ he went on. ‘We really iterate on these map – I can tell you that all the map that we are making get iterated on literally every day, the cat have play sessions every day, they have a little microcosm of the gaming community where they bitch about things they don’t like.’

‘All the new map we make are unique to MP,’ added Olin. ‘They’re 100% for multiplayer. there’s nothing reproduced from bingle player.’

Treyarch appears to be pinning the multiplayer modes’ success on a combination of customisable experience and social networking.

‘Players like to play phone call of duty in certain map in particular ways,’ lamia explained, ’so we’re going to give them particular tool to let them do that interior the game, without acquiring specific.

‘So we’re going deep on that, and we also know that participant interior the game and outside the game want to have the tool to socialise about their phone call of duty experiences, and we’re going to put a great deal of investment into allowing participant to do that, and again we’re not going into specifics.

I can tell you that we’re taking it to length we’ve never taken it.’

Intriguing stuff. Black Ops is out in Nov for PC, Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, element 110 and Wii. The full text of our interview will be live next week.