When Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 was confirmed to be launching without campaign, the announcement didn’t sit too well with a large section of the series’ fanbase. Sure, the fact that Blackout, the battle royale mode that replaced it, is absolutely excellent helped placate many of those people, but it’s still a controversial decision.
As it turns out, though, if a new report is to be believed, Tryearch hadn’t always planned on launching without a campaign. A user on Reddit recently put up a thread, claiming to be a former QA tester for the studio before being fired, and leaked a host of some very interesting information. That thread on Reddit has now been removed, but the info was compiled by a separate Reddit thread, while another Reddit thread also contains some of the relevant information from it.
It should be noted that though there was no actual verification of the person’s identity or their former position at Treyarch, their leaks look like the real thing based on information on Zombies easter eggs that they provided that aligns with what’s known to be true.
For starters, they claimed that Treyarch had actually been working on a campaign for Black Ops 4 up until mid-2017. This was going to be different from regular campaigns and would feature co-op matches between two teams of two fighting with or against each other in “race to the finish” style missions. This was ultimately scrapped halfway through 2017, because Treyarch wanted to make more multiplayer maps. Prior to being scrapped, five campaign missions had been designed, and Treyarch wanted to make more, but didn’t have the time to do so. Work on Blackout and Zombies apparently started around the same time.
They also stated that the first planned DLC pack is going to be a prequel to the Chaos storyline in Zombies, and will feature a new cast of characters. There’s also going to be one new Zombies map in each of the DLCs planned- Nuketown Zombies is also “100%” in the pipeline, but no date for its release has been planned. A 4v4 mode for Zombies is also part of the plan, though the leak claims that this might end up getting cancelled.
The person leaking this information also spoke a bit about some behind-the-scenes stuff over at Treyarch. Apparently, they were fired under dubious circumstances, as per their claims, while currently, there is allegedly only one QA tester who works 12 hours every day. They also claimed that Treyarch “only give a shit when big streamers get their game crashed. They don’t care if the minority’s game crashes”.
Do keep in mind that for now, this is unsubstantiated information, but given how much traction it seems to be getting over at Reddit and how, allegedly according to the community in the threads over there, Activision might be threatening legal action against the leaker due to disclosure of confidential information, there’s the possibility that it might be legit. Either way, stay tuned and we’ll keep you updated.