With customary fanfare, Activision’s reveal for Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 was a hype-inducing and action-packed shindig. Developer Treyarch was particularly generous in providing revealing details as well as multiple trailers.
Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 is built on three pillars: multiplayer, Blackout, and Zombie mode. The game has Treyarch’s ‘‘most ambitious multiplayer to date’ that promises a ‘refined tactical team experience’. Putting to one side the thrust and wall running skills from Infinite Warfare, the game remains fluid and fast-paced, but ‘100% boots on the ground’. New weapons, maps, modes, and a new fog of war feature will form part of the multiplayer experience.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ooyjaVdt-jA
Black Ops 4 multiplayer includes a dedicated manual regeneration button that completely changes the health mechanics, ridding the game of automatic health regeneration. Treyarch hope this will introduce a ‘new tactical decision point’ capable of changing the pace of the game because won’t be able to fire while healing. A rejigged version of the Pick 10 system is back and underwater fighting will be an integral part of the game play loop.
Specialists will feature with unique equipment, play styles, and capabilities, of which the grappling gun and a dedicated medic stood out, and are sure to guarantee some interesting tactical options for teams. Treyarch were also keen to explain that game play would be ‘guns up’. In other words, guns can be fired regardless of the circumstances or capabilities employed.
Black Ops 4 does not have a campaign per se, instead there are solo missions broken down into trials designed to teach the intricacies of each specialist, some new and others from past entries in the franchise. The trials have specialist backstories woven in. Alongside these, solo play is possible in multiplayer and in Zombie mode with bot teammates.
Speaking of Zombie mode, Black Ops 4 includes a story with three different experiences called IX (set in ancient Rome), Voyage of Despair (set on the sinking Titanic), and Blood of the Dead (taking place on classic Black Ops maps).
Blackout is Black Ops 4’s battle royale mode, combining the usual tropes of the genre with a unique Black Ops flavor. Blackout includes characters and locations from past games, as well as air, ground, and water vehicles. The map is piped as the largest ever created for a Black Ops title. Treyarch were coy when it came to details such as player numbers.
In conjunction with Beenox, Treyarch announced they are working on a standalone PC build of Black Ops 4 with dedicated servers and specific optimization like 4K, HDR, and an uncapped frame rate. The PC version will be exclusive to Battle.net, making it only the second non-Blizzard game on the platform.
Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 is due for release on October 12th 2018. For more information, head on over to PlayStation.Blog.
