Treyarch and Activision are trying a lot of new things with Call of Duty: Black Ops 4, like adding a battle royale-style mode and abandoning single-player campaign. The latter’s exclusion from the final version of the game received a lot of criticism but the studio believes they made the right decision.
Treyarch’s co-studio head Dan Bunting was recently featured in an interview with Eurogamer, where he justified the absence of a full single-player campaign, mainly to focus more on zombies and multiplayer as they have been the main modes representing Call of Duty for years.
Going back to the very beginning of Black Ops 4 development, we never had set out to make a traditional campaign. We always started from the place of, we’re going to make something different with this game that was going to be inspired by how our community was interacting with Black Ops 3 and the games over the years. We see more and more players spending more time with multiplayer and zombies, not just in the game, but out of the game, streaming and talking about it in forums. It’s generated a really huge crowd response. The decision was, we wanted to make a different style of game this time.
He continued to reveal there was never plans for a “traditional” campaign.
There was never a traditional campaign. We’ve always wanted to tell stories in different ways. We’ve always wanted to celebrate our community, especially how you play the game with friends. The heart and soul of this game is how you play games with friends and we wanted to do more with that than we’ve ever done before.
Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 releases on October 12 for PS4, Xbox One, and PC. Recently, the studio revealed more information regarding the battle royale mode, Blackout.