Watch the Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 reveal: Zombies, Battle Royale and more
Black Ops 4 lands on Oct. 12, 2018 -- and it changes everything you thought you knew about Call of Duty.
Remember that new Call of Duty game Activision teased us with back in April? It was just officially revealed. The company just showed off the trailer for Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 on Twitch, confirming what rumors have been saying for months: this game will have no single player campaign. That's not too surprising -- Call of Duty has always lived and died by its online experience, but this game is going all in, focusing on the franchise's famous Zombie mode and taking a stab at competitive gaming's latest trend: Battle Royale.
If you've ever played a first-person shooter where your player heals automatically after escaping immediate fire, you have the Call of Duty franchise to thank -- it's one of the series that made that particular gameplay mechanic popular... but that feature isn't a part of Black Ops 4. Instead, the developers say that players will have to heal their characters manually. It's a change designed to open up the player's tactical options in multiplayer: You can fall back and heal, or risk it all and charge forward when your opponent isn't expecting it.
Weapons are being tweaked, too -- giving each gun will have its own set of attachments -- including something called "operator mods," that give weapons extra features they wouldn't normally have. The game has also made recoil unique to each weapon, making mastering each weapon a skill that needs to be developed.
If those changes all sound like they might be tweaking the Call of Duty formula to better fit the "sole survivor" gameplay of titles like Fortnite and PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds, you're on the money. It all culminates to make "Black Out," the game's new Battle Royale mode.
How Black Out will work is still unclear, but the team says it will take place on the largest Call of Duty map ever created -- one over 1,400 times larger than Nuketown.
Not good enough? OK then -- the game's popular zombies mode is getting big changes, too. Enormous changes, in fact.
No, this screenshot isn't a mistake. This is a Call of Duty Game.
Yes, that screenshot above IS a Call of Duty game. The new Zombies mode looks almost like a homage to Left 4 Dead -- four heroes fighting hordes of zombies as a team in tons of different scenarios... but in Black Ops 4 Zombies, those heroes seem to be jumping through time. So far, the team has showed off modes that pit players against the undead in ancient Rome and on the Titanic.
Amid all these major changes, there was one more hidden in what the company didn't announce: a single-player campaign. Just as rumors suggested, Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 will be multiplayer only -- though Treyarch's Mark Lamia says the game will still have stories weaved throughout each multiplayer mode.
Finally, the company announced that, for the first time, Call of Duty will be available on Blizzard's Battle.Net service. Hardly a surprise.
Black Ops 4 is set to release on Oct. 12, 2018, on the Xbox One , PlayStation 4 and on PC via Battle.net.
Not a Black Ops fan? Don't worry. Call of Duty's persistent rival series Battlefield just announced the title of its next entry: Battlefield V. The game, with an expected release later this year, will be revealed in more detail in a livestream May 23.