Call of Duty Black Ops 4 Reveal – Battle Royale, Multiplayer, New Zombies, No Campaign
So yesterday was the day of the big Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 reveal and it was quite a packed 45 or so minutes. We got to take a look at the multiplayer, a new Zombies story and the heavily rumoured Battle Royale mode was announced. However, the other rumour that perhaps not so many of us were looking forward to, was the confirmation that Black Ops 4 won’t have a traditional singleplayer campaign, although the folks at Treyarch and Activision did emphasise that there are many ways to experience Black Ops 4 is you’re a solo player.
Arguably the biggest feature of this year’s instalment is their Battle Royal mode, jumping on the every-growing bandwagon, with their version being called Blackout. It’s said to feature one huge map (at least at launch) that is 15,000 times the size of the Nuketown multiplayer map. The mode will combine 10 years of Black Ops history, with its characters (story, multiplayer and zombies), gadgets, weapons, locations and maps. In-fact, Blackout will have various sections of popular Black Ops maps of past scattered throughout its arena.
Blackout will offer combat on land, air and sea. But how will these vehicles be implemented fairly into the game? Will they be lying around the map free to pick up? Will they be killstreak rewards? Will they be acquired by loot boxes or will they be easier to obtain as a whole with real-world money? These are just some of the questions floating about in my head right now. Sticking true to the Battle Royale formula, players will be thrown into the map and battle until the last player or squad is standing. It will be interesting to see how the gameplay mechanics of the Call of Duty franchise will be implemented, although the amount of players thrown into the map was not revealed, hopefully it will hit around the 100 player mark.
So let’s get on to the more traditional multiplayer. With this being the next Black Ops it was assumed by many that we will see double-jumps and jetpacks return, however, that is not true as a big deal was made that Black Ops 4, while being a futuristic shooter, there will be no double-jumps, jetpacks or wall-running of the sort. It’s all “boots on the ground”, which I am happy about at least.
It was also said that the multiplayer will have narrative aspects with it being set in-between Black Ops 2 and Black Ops 3 which will be represented in the Specialist character classes on offer. They didn’t go into much detail on how stories for the online playable characters would work, but honestly, I wouldn’t go thinking that this would be any kind of replacement for a fully-fledged singleplayer campaign. If I was going to take a guess, I’d say that every now and again, each character will get a cut-scene when you’ve achieved or about to take on certain objectives, but I could be wrong.
Specialists were quite a big deal in Black Ops 3, and in Black Ops 4 you’ll have old favourites and new characters to choose from. As before, each character will have their own unique abilities, perks, weapons and style. The Specialists will also their own trial modes, which will also have some narrative aspects, which I’m guessing will be something like tutorials with cut-scenes, Treyarch describe the stories of Black Ops 4 as a “narrative universe”.
Treyarch went on to speak about how proud they are that each weapon in the game has had great attention to detail, to help each one of them feel even more unique to the last. Each weapon has benefited from 3D tracers and animations and a “true predictive recoil system” meaning that they should manoeuvre and handle more realistically, bringing an added learning curve if you will. Each of the weapons will also have their own unique attachments, rather than having certain attachments shared across a variety of guns, now they will be exclusive to that particular weapon.
Interestingly, no longer will your online character auto-heal, instead it is now done manually. Now you must activate your healing in the heat of the battle, perhaps similar to reloading a weapon. However, much like reloading a weapon in multiplayer, it will leave you vulnerable for those slit seconds, so you’ll have to be careful and at times tactical when you choose to heal your character. Other more traditional multiplayer highlights includes the return of League Play (for all) and apparently improved re-spawning, which we’ve heard many times before, so let’s see if that really has been improved upon come release.
Zombies will once again play a huge part in Black Ops with this fourth instalment. However, instead of now having one chapter at launch, we’ll have three from the get-go. The first is IX, which seems to thrown you in some kind of Russell Crowe-like Gladiator battle arena armed with melee weapons to take down zombie hordes and a big ass boss. Out of the three chapters we saw, this was probably my favourite. The second is Voyage of Despair, which takes place on a luxury cruise ship as your team attempts to retrieve some kind of powerful artefact. The third chapter at launch is Blood of the Dead, which seems to be a re-imagining of a zombie chapter from Black Ops 2 set in Alcatraz prison called Blood of the Dead. We only got a very brief glimpse of the final chapter.
The new Zombies mode in Black Ops 4 will have a complete new story, cast of new characters and worlds to explore. You’ll also be able to customise your Zombies experience with a feature called Mutations. Here you’ll be able to tweak certain gameplay aspects such as difficulty, zombie speed, health, damage, change zombie types and much more. To go with the various difficulty options, will be a more simplified Zombies mode called Rush, which by the sounds of it will be your standard horde mode offering with no objectives, other than survival. If you can’t find a team of players to play Zombies with, you can also play solo with bots making up the remaining numbers.
Finally, there was some news that may please many PC players as it was revealed that the PC version of Black Ops 4 will have Beenox as its dedicated development team with I imagine, Treyarch overseeing the project. So this in a nutshell pretty much means that the PC version should not be a console port and will be fully optimised to benefit the PC platform. Black Ops 4 on PC will also feature exclusively on Battle.net.
Well that pretty much covers my overview of the Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 reveal and I’ll leave you with my final thoughts. In truth, despite what Activision and Treyarch say, I’m not convinced with the removal of the singleplayer campaign, for me, especially with the Black Ops series, it offered arguably the best singleplayer campaign in the Call of Duty franchise. Everyone is each to their own, but as much as I enjoy the multiplayer aspect, I also love to get stuck into a good old singleplayer campaign.
I know Activision and Treyarch are really pushing all other aspects of Black Ops 4, but if other rumours are to be believed, a singleplayer campaign was in development, but because it was coming along so poorly, it got scrapped. So are Activision and Treyarch really convinced in what they are saying or are they trying to convince themselves and others that Black Ops 4 is better off without a singleplayer campaign? I can’t say for sure, but it has left me feeling a little disappointed at least. That’s not to say that I won’t enjoy Black Ops 4, I could be proven wrong (and I hope that I will), but only time will tell.
And we all know that Black Ops 4 will have microtransactions and loot boxes galore, and with its three main modes being multiplayer focused, it has even more potential to squeeze every penny out of you that it can. Because from the get go, this will be a full priced game, with various editions at launch and you’ll need an online subscription to play (other than on PC). So with the game surely to be a microtransaction orgy, will Activision ditch their traditional season pass/map pack formula? Again, only time will tell.
Oh and one more thing, if having no singleplayer campaign is such a great thing (even though it was rumoured to already being in development before it was scrapped), why did they show us all those fantastic highlights at the beginning of the reveal show from previous Black Ops singleplayer campaigns? Those highlights just made me miss what you can’t have in Black Ops 4 all that more. I don’t know, hopefully the game will prove me wrong and I’ll be enjoying it when it releases later in the year, until then, more is said to be revealed during this coming summer.
Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 will release Friday, October 12th for PC, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One. Pre-ordering also gets you access to the forthcoming multiplayer beta. You can also watch the full reveal event below if you wish.