Well, they finally did it. They finally killed Call of Duty's singleplayer. Activision Blizzard revealed today that Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 will come with a battle royale mode called Blackout when it finally launches on 12 October 2018.
Black Ops 4's Blackout mode features a roster of familiar Black Ops names and will take place on "the largest map ever built in Call of Duty". The company claim it's actually 1,500 times bigger than Nuketown and players will have ground, air and sea vehicles at their disposal too.
It turns out that Activision is going full Blizzard here, as Black Ops 4's PC version will be optimised specifically for Battlenet. Treyarch and their co-developer Beenox announced the franchise officially moving to Blizzard's platform in October.
Activision confirmed the return of Pick 10 system and unveiled Specialists, the latter seeming like a step in Overwatch's direction. Indeed, many were surprised to see on Call of Duty material but it appears that Treyarch and the Overwatch team have a long history of cooperation.
Black Ops 4 will also come with Zombie mode, which has its own story as well as a . Much to the disappointment of hordes of gamers who openly expressed their opinions of Activision's creative escapades, all the companies in question recommend the Zombie mode as a replacement for singleplayer.
At the moment it's still unknown whether Blackout will follow the unwritten battle royale formula of 100 players but we should know soon enough. What is certain however, is that many players are very vocal about skipping Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 for the first time in their CoD-playing career, so we'll see how this plays out.
Activision
Having said that, we at the office are extremely underwhelmed by what we've seen. We were thinking about other names, such as Battlefield of Duty or CoDerwatch. Seriously though, if crowd reactions are anything to go by, both Activision and Blizzard better start figuring out ways to pull a rabbit out of a hat by October.
