Call of Duty: Black Ops 3 runs on old, but improved CoD engine

According to Treyarch, game engines are like onions, they have layers. Call of Duty's game engine does a great job at defining this statement. The engine was built around the Quake 3 Arena id Tech 3 engine and has since been built up on and revised with each iteration of Call of Duty.

Speaking with Gamesradar, the Black Ops 3 multiplayer director Dan Bunting explained how the game engine works."Engines are funny things. People used to talk about game engines as if it was a singular product that the game’s built on. But engines are really collections of tech that have some very basic, fundamental architecture to them."

Even though the engine has seen revisions, it still maintains the 'core' features from the Quake 3 Arena id Tech 3 engine. "The core architecture of the game is still based on the technologies that it’s been built off of," Bunting explained before going on to say, "most engines in the game industry, for large scale games, have all come from a lineage back to an earlier game engine".

According to Bunting, one of the biggest revisions the engine has seen is in terms of how the AI works in the game. "We had a lot of tech overhaul we had to do. We had to basically re-engineer our graphics engine, we had to re-engineer our AI system. There was a lot of tech work for the transition to the next-gen platforms to really capitalize on the power."

Bunting closed off the game engine talk with what the heart of Black Ops 3 is: "The responsiveness is something that’s really close to the heart of this game; millisecond scales. Being able to run at 60 frames a second, and being able to render the kind of stuff we render on screen, is impressive."

Revising, improving and building off of age-old game engines is not entirely crazy, Larian Studios has done with their Divinity games. If the engine works, the only real need is to keep it to current standards.

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