Why there’s No Single Player in Black Ops 4

            The newest entry in the Call of Duty franchise, Black Ops 4, is going in a new, interesting direction for the game. While every single edition of this annual game release has included a story for players to fight their way through, David Vondahar, creative lead of Treyarch Games (the dev team of the Black Ops series), says the team decided to instead focus on optimization of multiplayer and the other modes included on-disk. This year, Call of Duty is adapting to the success of Fortnite and other Battle-Royale type games and including their own version in the game. And, of course, a Zombie survival mode is on disk, this time featuring 3 separate maps and Easter eggs unlocked and completely free from the jump. Though this is a bold, somewhat unexpected move, Treyarch does have a history pushing the boundaries of Call of Duty’s gameplay template. Theirs was the studio that brought us the now standard create-a-class system that allows players to choose any combination of attachments, perks, and equipment with the only restriction being total points allotted.

            But this is new territory, even for Treyarch, and the team doesn’t do anything without reason. Something must have told them that this seemed to be the natural evolution of the game, so what information were they privy to? According to Dextero.com, their source, True Achievements, a website that tracks trophy and achievement data from Xbox and PlayStation, recorded that only 22% of players even completed a single player campaign, on average across all CoD games. And the previous Black Ops entry, Bo3, had an under 10% completion rate. While this certainly isn’t news for long-time fans of the series, sticking with the choice to focus solely on multiplayer experiences for Bo4 puts a new sense of pressure on the games to be enjoyable. While the resources a campaign requires from a disk and code are now being applied to multiplayer improvements (hopefully), if the player base doesn’t like the changes, we could still see this as being a disappointing year for competitive CoD. Only time will tell. Black Ops will be here sooner than usual to boot, slated for an October 12^th worldwide drop.