Call of Duty Black Ops 4 was a really optimized PC game that impressed us with its overall performance. And while the game may have sold well, despite the lack of a traditional single-player campaign, it has been revealed that Black Ops 4 went through development hell.
Kotaku’s Jason Schreier published yesterday a really interesting article, in which it was revealed that Black Ops 4 originally had a campaign mode. This campaign mode was quite unique as it would be centered on an ambitious two-versus-two multiplayer mechanic, however Treyarch decided to cancel it due to technical concerns, timing issues, and negative feedback from playtesters.
As Jason Schreier wrote:
“Black Ops 4 was set after Black Ops 3’s story, but rather than play through the campaign yourself, you’d play alongside a partner, battling against a pair of human opponents. (If you wanted to play single-player, they’d all be AI-driven bots.) Each side would pick a faction, and you’d compete to gun down enemies and battle over different objectives in a post-apocalyptic world. One side might try to destroy a convoy, for example, while the other side worked to protect it. Or maybe one faction would set off to protect a journalist while the other faction tried to assassinate them. Each mission would give you chances to get into shootouts with the other team, hampering their progress if you did well. During different moments throughout the story, you’d also get the chance to defect and switch sides if you weren’t happy with the choices your faction was making.”
Now as you may all know, Treyarch has advertised Blackout, the game’s battle royale mode, as the next big thing present in Black Ops 4. However, the team did not originally have any plans to implement such a battle royale mode to the game.
After cancelling the campaign mode, Black Ops 4 had only two modes: the traditional multiplayer mode and the Zombies mode. Treyarch was desperately searching for something to replace the campaign mode and after the success of PUBG and Fortnite, the team decided to include a Call of Duty-themed battle royale mode, Blackout.
According to Schreier’s report, Treyarch started working on the Blackout mode in early 2018, meaning that the team had less than a year in order to create this battle royale mode. Given the fact that Blackout runs great, though it sometimes suffers from some really awful textures, Treyarch pulled off a miracle.
John is the founder and Editor in Chief at DSOGaming. He is a PC gaming fan and highly supports the modding and indie communities. Before creating DSOGaming, John worked on numerous gaming websites. While he is a die-hard PC gamer, his gaming roots can be found on consoles. John loved – and still does – the 16-bit consoles, and considers SNES to be one of the best consoles. Still, the PC platform won him over consoles. That was mainly due to 3DFX and its iconic dedicated 3D accelerator graphics card, Voodoo 2. John has also written a higher degree thesis on the “The Evolution of PC graphics cards.”
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