Treyarch Explains Absence Of 'Call Of Duty: Black Ops 4' Campaign

One of the biggest change in”Call of Duty: Black Ops 4” is the absence of a traditional single-player campaign. The heads of Treyarch, the studio behind the game, recently sat down in an interview and discussed why exactly they decided to remove the story mode.

“Development is a journey,” Treyarch co-studio head Dan Bunting told Game Informer. “We try a lot of different ideas and a lot of different things. The game that we are making has evolved over time, and that's just a part of development. I can't remember a single game that we've made that hasn't had a dramatic change in the prototyping stage. That's what prototyping is for. You prototype ideas; some of them work out great, some of them don't work out great and you pivot. You find a new idea [and] focus on that. We follow the fun.”

Bunting also said that they started developing “Black Ops 4” with the very big ambition to make a game that’s built entirely around social gameplay, which was something that the studio was very passionate about. He is referring to online multiplayer, which includes the new Zombies and the new Blackout battle royale modes. Bunting explained that they had to make changes to deliver that kind of experience.

“There wasn’t a campaign in the first place,” Treyarch design director David Vonderhaar said. The two also went on to say that “Black Ops 4” is a multiplayer game, top to bottom. Bunting pointed out that they could have created a single-player campaign and just add cooperative gameplay, but it would still have been a narrative-heavy and guided experience that would just limit the the game's “replayability.”

“We can make a really big campaign and we can add co-op to it, but at the end of the day it’s still going to be such a narrative-heavy, guided experience for players,” Bunting said. “The replayability is limited. We wanted to make a game that players would just keep playing for a long time, because that’s something we are passionate about.”

“Call of Duty: Black Ops 4” is scheduled to be released on PS4, Xbox One and PC on Oct. 12. The game’s Blackout battle royale mode is now available as a beta on the PS4 console. So far, Blackout is doing well and it has even been described as “a polished PUBG” by Eurogamer.