It should come as no surprise that Treyarch, this year’s Call of Duty developer, is working on a battle royale-style mode for Black Ops 4.
The mode, titled “Blackout”, appears to have been in the works for a while, although probably around the time PUBG and before Fortnite really started to take the industry by the neck on the way towards world domination.
So far the information in relation to the mode is scarce, but we have a few tidbits to tide us over until what will inevitably be information overload out of E3 later this month.
The map will reportedly be up to 1500 times bigger than Nuketown, which is pretty damn big, unsurprising seeing as a battle royale mode needs the space to accomodate its intent.
A wide range of characters will also make their way into the mode, including from the original Zombies Origins series.
We can also expect weapons from the Zombies series to make a return, with air, sea and land vehicles all on offer to players.
There’s still many a question, however, related to how the game mode will play out. How many players will there be in any one match? 100? Treyarch tells us that it’s “multiples higher than the highest we’ve ever done”, which sets a low bar as far as battle royale modes go.
Important, players want to know how — if at all — multiplayer progression in Zombies and standard multiplayer will carry over into this mode.
Most important is the map size, and we probably won’t get anything definitive about that for a while, outside of it being much, much bigger than the iconic Nuketown map.
That would peg it at under what we get with Fortnite, but firmly above anything we’ve seen in a Call of Duty game before.
The mode has gone through countless ages of testing so far, with Treyarch continually experimenting and changing its approach to the highly anticipated new mode.
Interestingly, Treyarch says it tested the mode with an astonishing 144 square mile map. That’s bigger than anything we’ve seen in PUBG or Fortnite … by a considerable margin.
“We have invested a huge amount of our development energy into those tools,” said Dan Bunting, game director in an interview with Newsweek. “They can basically paint terrain down in massive, massive spaces. We had a test map of 12 miles by 12 miles as the biggest space we were able to build and run.”
We know that this definitely won’t be the end product, both because all signs point to the Nuketown measurement as being the most likely, and due to the fact the game would be extremely unlikely — nay, impossible — to run at 60fps with a map that size.
We’re bound to get more info about Black Ops 4 Blackout mode at E3 in the coming days, so be on the lookout for more details as they drip through!
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