Wednesday, April 18th 2018
Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 to Shed Single-Player Campaign; Doubling Down on Zombies, MP
News reported by Polygon paint the next installment in the metronome-like cadence of annual Call of Duty game releases as a much less interesting package than gamers are used to. Citing industry sources, Polygon is reporting that Call of Duty Black Ops 4 is going to shed its single player campaign entirely, citing a lack of development time to deliver it on launch. This is strange for a number of reasons. First, Treyarch, who's helming the games' development this time around, enjoyed a three-years development period to make the game happen; second, there's no need to do anything else than some incremental changes to the game's engine, as has been the case for COD games for years, so that couldn't have taken up much development time; third, using development resources to "just about" finish the games' campaign and then ultimately deciding to scrape it altogether just seems like a very bad business move.
If anything, this seems like a thought-out move, with Treyarch (likely at its parent company's Activision bidding) decided do double down on development of multiplayer and the COD series' now certain-to-appear zombies mode. The decision likely comes as a testing of the waters for a pure multiplayer experience, saving the $ in development efforts for a high-budget single player campaign, and seeing whether or not there's some commercial success to the idea. I, for one, never set foot on the multiplayer modes of any COD game, and instead enjoyed the linear campaigns and set pieces of the main single player mode. This is also particularly interesting a decision, since a) COD has seen such a release, when Black Ops 3 released to previous-gen (Xbox 360 and PS3) consoles without its single player campaign; and b) with Respawn Entertainment going the full 180º difference, choosing to add a single player campaign (which was great) to its Titanfall 2 game.
Polygon reports that there'll likely be a cooperative game mode to make up for the lack of single-player. As if. And there's a chance that Activision will be releasing a "Remastered" version of its Modern Warfare 2 campaign this year - whether bundled with Black Ops 4 or not, it remains to be seen. If that's the case, I have to say this is a sorry state for the industry: rehash old campaigns, and deliver half a new game, half an old game, likely for the full retail price. It almost makes the lootbox system look good in comparison.
Source:
Polygon
Polygon reports that there'll likely be a cooperative game mode to make up for the lack of single-player. As if. And there's a chance that Activision will be releasing a "Remastered" version of its Modern Warfare 2 campaign this year - whether bundled with Black Ops 4 or not, it remains to be seen. If that's the case, I have to say this is a sorry state for the industry: rehash old campaigns, and deliver half a new game, half an old game, likely for the full retail price. It almost makes the lootbox system look good in comparison.
32 Comments on Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 to Shed Single-Player Campaign; Doubling Down on Zombies, MP
MP is what it is all about, and hopefully we could get something that resembled what we had in BO1-2.
Dedicated servers with a normal console to manage them, proper mechanics and weapons, and balanced maps
ps. there's a free game that has (had?) an open beta named Ironsight, i would recommand trying it. It tries to replicate the MW\BO experience.
When I first heard about the next CoD being a Black Ops game I thought "yeah, here comes a decent campaign." I wasn't thinking "oh cool, more of the same screaming kiddies on different maps."
Reason behind the change is probably Activision deciding to fully adopt the 'games as a service' business model. They are going to fill BLops:4 chock full of microtransactions while still charging you over $80 for what is technically half a game now...
As for the MW2 remaster.... I see two potential issues with this. Firstly being it wasnt that great a CoD game to begin with since thats when they took away dedicated servers, cut the player cap to something like 12 or 16players per game to cater for the console market with technically inferior tech that couldnt run the game with 64 players and dedicated servers like the good old days.... vastly smaller maps and no developer SDKs were given to the community to develop their own mods and maps for the game.
gone were the server admins and mods, turning the MP into a cesspit of wallhackers and aimbotters, as far as i remember there was no option to votekick them sort of players. The only choice you have was to leave the game but the stupid P2P game finding system would place you back in the same game 90% of the time 3 times in a row anyway so to quit the game to try join another was a rather pointless endeavour.
the MP session errors when you were trying to get into a game with friends and also freezing gameplay for 2mins while the game searched for a new machine to host the game on cuz the last one quit was just such a backwards approach.
There was nothing good or memorable about MW2 apart from it being made 100% for consoles from the ground up. It was a huge step backwards.
Knowing Activision, they will give it the full CoD4:MW remaster treatment and fill it full of microtransactions and only make it purchasable as part of a bundlewith their next CoD game because thats the only way they are gonna get most people to buy their games these days.
I played MW2 as much as i played Operation Racoon City.... Less than 3hrs total played spread over a few months just to let ACtivision get their patches and bugfixes in but it was terrible from start to finish.
MW2 marked the day when I would never buy another CoD game and this boycott is still in place today.
Shame , Black Ops had the best campaigns.
MP hasn't been good since #2. Yes, CoD 2.
Im into this kind of stuff
As for single player campaigns, I was never a fan of them since CoD2. MW was okay, but it was the very last single player campaign that I had any interest in.
Oh well... Every series dies off one way or another.
I was looking forward to this game... Now I'm not..
Bye Activision...your officially on my Boycott list.
That said, I also have only rented the last 4 or 5 CoD releases since it's not worth full price when mostly play CoD SP and don't go back to it once the campaign is done. So from a business standpoint maybe it makes sense to focus on MP. But games without SP campaigns have paid the price lately (SW BF1, Titanfall 1), so it seems like a super-risky move.
And like the article said, considering they've spent 3 years on it, and most of the code was already there from the prior releases, cutting half the game 6 months from launch doesn't give me a warm fuzzy feeling that this will be a strong CoD release.