During the community reveal for Call of Duty: Black Ops 4, Treyarch announced that the game won’t be featuring a single-player campaign and will instead focus on three maps for the Zombie experience and a battle royale mode called “Blackout”.
Talking to Polygon, the studio co-head Dan Bunting has explained the reasons why the developer has took such decision, and denied the rumors that simply there wasn’t enough time to build a story mode in time for launch.
When asked particularly about the fact that rumors hinted at the lack of time to build a story mode, the man from Treyarch explained that it was also a matter of being closer to community’s interest, which was apparently slowing down when it came to single-player.
“When we set out to make this game, we never started with the idea that we would make a traditional campaign. That was just not part of our plan. We started from a place that we were gonna make a game that across the board can be playable with friends. That’s been our mission from day one,” Bunting told Polygon.
“Of course, through the course of development, as always happens with every game, we’re to challenge our conventions … trying different things. Sometimes those things are bold and crazy and innovative sometimes things work out, sometimes they don’t work out. As development goes on though, you’re always pushing the best ideas forward and that’s what was reflected today.”
Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 releases on October 12, 2018.
“If you look at the Black Ops series and how players have interacted with it,” he said, “how our players are engaged with our games — changes in the industry around us [are] obviously a big part of it — it’s being more and more experienced as a social thing.
“Of course we have a very large Zombies following with the Black Ops franchise … and when you look at how they interact with our game, whether it’s in the game itself, online, forums, streamers, YouTubers … everybody’s interacting as a community and it’s a pretty massive phenomenon. When you see that kind of a passion for our game that we feel is potentially underserved, we want to make sure we have more of that.”
