Black Ops 4 Q&A: Traditional Campaign Was Never Part of Plan, Designing Blackout (Battle Royale)

Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 Q&A – Lack of a Campaign

Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 has officially been revealed to the world, and Twinfinite recently got some hands-on time with the game at its reveal event. We also had the chance to sit down in a roundtable interview with Yale Miller, Senior Producer at Treyarch, and Matt Scronce, Game Designer at Treyarch. We got to discuss a few details on the new surprise battle royale mode, Blackout, as well as the choice to not have a traditional campaign, changes made to guns and accessories, and more in Black Ops 4.

Note: This interview has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity. For transparency’s sake, we were joined by other outlets during this roundtable interview, so any question marked with a Q was asked by another outlet, while anything asked by Twinfinite is marked with Twinfinite. 

Q: Can you kind of give us a timeline of this project, kind of the genesis leading to where we are now?

Yale Miller: Yeah so, Black Ops 3 ends. As soon as Black Ops 3 ended, obviously there were goals that we wanted to do with Black Ops 3 with more social, co-op, you can play missions out of order. So that’s what we had on Black Ops 3, and then the idea was to make an even more social kind of non-traditional campaign, and then multiplayer to kind of double down on tactical teamwork, and then Zombies to make a new story.

Those are kind of the initials on that, and then iteration and iteration over the next couple years of kind of nailing some of those things down. As far as a traditional campaign went, we were never doing that, we felt like where we were going with campaign wasn’t doing what we wanted it to, so the decision was made to scrap that, and then lean into an opportunity that we saw with all the technologies and different things that we had been building to bring Blackout to the table as well. It’s been an ongoing experience. We’re iterating daily. We were tuning up until just before this event, and there’s people back at the office looking at telemetry based on gameplay and listening to fans’ responses, and changing things. There’s a bunch more specialists that we need to bring to the table.

Twinfinite: Not having a campaign, do you think that’s something you want to do for the future of Call of Duty, or is that more of an experiment?

Miller: I think a lot of the things that we do start off as experiments and we go down a path, and if it’s more fun it sticks. As far as what we’re gonna do beyond Black Ops 4, I have no idea. Right now we’re so solely focused on making the biggest and best experience with Black Ops 4. As far as where that takes us in the future, I know we’ll take what we have with multiplayer and grow that over the next year and years. For Blackout, this is just the start. We’re gonna grow that and change that.

Q: Is there any pushback at all from the publisher when you go to them and say “We don’t want to do the campaign anymore.”

Miller: What would you guess? (laugh) With a franchise as big as Call of Duty and the success we have there’s always a fear of trying different things, but that’s why I feel like the Call of Duty model works really well. Activision gives us a lot of freedom to try different things, and each studio is allowed to try different things.

Scronce: I think Activision knows that we at Treyarch aren’t afraid to try different things. So I think it’s kind of expected, and we expect that of ourselves.

Miller: We also have the pedigree that we’re lucky to stand back on, that we tried different things with zombies. People were not necessarily happy with us spending time development time on previous titles. Lik,e let’s do something with Zombies, ‘What? What are you doing, no, we didn’t hire you to do that. You’re spending how many resources against that?” To then, ‘Wait, you should do Zombies again.’”

Matt Scronce: Yeah one of the little taglines we say to each other, I’m on the design team, so it’s about ‘finding the fun.’ So regardless of what it is, whether it’s Blackout or Zombies, it’s all about finding the fun, and even diving down into those it’s about finding the fun and creating that tactical experience that we’ve tried to create across the whole game.

Q: When we were reporting on the rumors that the game wasn’t going to have a campaign, our comments sections just kind of lit up with people that were pissed of, proclaiming that they weren’t going to buy it. What would you say to those players to convince them to give this one a shot?

Scronce: Sure, like we said, we never set out to create a traditional campaign like some players might know it. The hope is that we’re gonna deliver more content on day one than they’ve ever seen, specifically for fans of narrative, we’ve doubled down on narrative. Just because we don’t have a traditional campaign doesn’t mean we have no narrative. We’ve got the completely new experiences in zombies, we’re gonna have Blackout, we’re weaving some of our favorite narrative and locales from past games into that.

Then in multiplayer, we’re really doubling down on letting players get to know those specialists. Even inside of that we’ve got our solo missions, and specialists will have their own solo missions. So you’ll get to learn about some of the background there, about how their ability works, how their equipment works. If you’re a fan of narrative, we’re definitely going to have that in the game.

Q: How would you say that narrative is actually weaved into the Blackout mode, considering it’s something that’ll be different every time people play it?

Miller: I mean, we’re not gonna get into too specific stuff there. But obviously, you’re gonna be able to go through the different locales of Black Ops 1, 2, and 3, which have their own kind of narrative feel to them. And you’ll be able to play those favorite characters from past games, and the specialists. It’s just super exciting and we have that full narrative team who’s really focused on looking at the game as a whole, and how we can kind of inject that narrative.

Continue to the next page for more on Blackout, changes to guns, and Treyarch’s plans to iterate on Black Ops 4. 

Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 Q&A – Mutliplayer

Twinfinite: With Blackout, it’s built on the same engine as the rest of the game, right?

Scronce: It is.

Twinfinite: If you can go into it, how were you able to expand on what was normally a 12 or 16 player match into something that large?

Miller: So the engine and the things that we have, like if you look at Black Ops 3, the size of some of those maps, and four-player co-op and a lot of those technologies. When we were thinking about what we were gonna do next, and kind of growing and making an even more non-traditional campaign, there were tons of technology things that we were working on that would lend themselves to it. And when we were thinking about doing a battle royale mode, kind of the decisions are can we keep gunplay as awesome as it is, can we make engagements, can we keep the level of visual fidelity. We wouldn’t be doing it if we didn’t have the back-end engine work, we’ve got a lot of really really smart people, a whole lot smarter than me, working on low-level tech. There are things, we’re pulling different bits and bobs that we have from tech that we’ve built for different campaigns, for multiplayer, even things that we’ve built for Zombies, and using those things as building blocks to allow us bring what’s a truly Black Ops experience to Blackout.

Q: Is there any chance of working with Sony to try and do cross-play?

Miller: No to my knowledge right now. It may be something that other people are working on, but I’m not close enough to that to answer.

Q: Something that they noted in the presentation, that stuck out to me, is the accessories for the guns. That the guns themselves have attachments and not the classes. Can you talk about that?

Scronce: Sure, each gun was meant to be an individual, its own special snowflake. So this SMG that has extended mags, maybe it’s the only one that has extended mags, and maybe this AR with a suppressor is the only one that has a suppressor. It’s about setting a role for that gun. For example, a stealthy assault rifle may have a suppressor, whereas a mobility SMG may have quick draw. It’s about creating different archetypes over the vast library of weapons we have, and then assigning special attachments that work best for that gameplay.

Miller: So instead of guns becoming really broad, you can put any attachment onto any gun to make it similar to another gun, it’s like picking what’s best about that gun, so if it’s a high capacity gun, the attachments on it are gonna make it really good at doing that thing so you’re playing that role. Versus making the gun okay at everything, we wanted to make guns that are great at doing a thing.

Q: With the pick ten system coming back, what kind of work went into making this system more balanced?

Scronce: It still comes down to our balancing values, in every single game we’ve always been very dedicated on finding balance pre- and post-launch. We’re a very data-driven design team, we’re always gathering data on how many kills a weapon has, how many kills a weapon has with attachments, the engagement distances. It comes down to the data, but at the core it’s about what makes it fun.

Miller: Iteration, that’s the best answer. When we come out there will probably be some loadout that is better than others, it’s just a fact, but we will continue to noodle on those and work on them.

Twinfinite: With this process of iteration, adding on all this stuff is a huge undertaking, especially with a battle royale mode. In a year’s time when another Call of Duty releases, how do you see Blackout and the other modes interacting with that, are you trying to make it have longevity?

Miller: We don’t think about it as interacting with other Call of Duty games, we think about it as a mode that will live on everything we do, and part of our ideas for a non-traditional campaign from the start were about creating experiences that can be more organic, that can live on. It’s not, okay I played it, I know what happens, I’m done. We’re thinking about Blackout as something that, when we come out and Blackout will be on the disc at launch that’s gonna be an epic experience, but that’s something that we’re gonna grow on. It’s gonna be a platform for us that we can just change, iterate, who knows, new modes, whatever else. There’ll be different things we’re gonna try, but at this point we’re just talking about the basics of what we’ve got, and it’s really about growing and making it better.

Scronce: It’s all about longevity for us and replayability, you know. We’re still supporting Black Ops 3 to this day, and we’re gonna double down on that for Black Ops 4.

Twinfinite: Are there any plans to bring any aspect of Black Ops 4 to Nintendo Switch?

Miller: No there is not.