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Treyarch: 'There Was Never' A Black Ops 4 Single-Player Campaign
With this week's reveal of Black Ops IIII came a reveal that was more of a confirmation: Leaks and rumors had been reporting it would lack a story-based single-player campaign, due to that part of the game not coming together and being scrapped. While we know for sure the first part of that statement is true, the other one, not so much.
Speaking with Eurogamer, Treyarch co-studio head Dan Bunting said it wasn't so much that a campaign was being built and ultimately tossed aside, but more that it was never part of the plan. "Going back to the very beginning of Black Ops 4 development, we never had set out to make a traditional campaign," Bunting said. From the start, the Black Ops IIII set out to make something different that was tailored to the response players had to Black Ops III. Of course, this meant leaning more into the multiplayer offerings, but also experiment with the overall structure of the game. "Throughout the course of development we tried a lot of ideas, a lot of things that challenged convention, that might be a different kind of twist on how we might think of a Call of Duty game in the past, or a Black Ops game in the past," Bunting said. "As we did that, some things make it, some things don't."
Although many Call of Duty players either play and forget the single-player campaigns (if they bother with them at all), Bunting is aware that many people play Call of Duty games for their campaigns, and acknowledges the fears. "I think change is always going to be hard for people," he told Eurogamer. He then points to number of solo missions players can undertake to learn more about the backstory of the individual character classes, which also act as an introduction to the game itself.
To learn more about what Call of Duty IIII hopes to offer players, check out Dan Tack's preview from earlier this week.
[Source: Eurogamer]
Our Take
No amount of multiplayer offerings are going to push some people who just like to play through the campaigns to make the jump to multiplayer, and those solo missions don't sound like the necessary bridge. But, considering how disjointed the Black Ops III campaign was, maybe that's for the best.
It's clear from the feature set, however, that Treyarch is aware people are going to see Black Ops IIII as lesser without it, and is compensating with perhaps the most dense feature set of a Call of Duty game yet. I'm super-curious to see what the long-term reception to the first multiplayer-only game in the series will be, especially after the wide acceptance of titles like PUBG and Overwatch.
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