Treyarch says Black Ops 4 didn’t ‘have a campaign in the first place,’ game was built for ‘social modes’

In a new video interview with GameInformer, as their coverage continues this month with new features about Call of Duty: Black Ops 4, GameInformer asked about the campaign in Black Ops 4 and ‘what happened to it.’

Treyarch’s Vonderhaar and Dan Bunting discussed the idea that Black Ops 4 was always going to be a ‘social game’ built for having social interaction across all modes of play, and a campaign did not fit that vision for Call of Duty: Black Ops 4.

Vahn and Bunting responded in regards to it by saying:

“It wasn’t a campaign as people usually refer to it anyways. It’s like when people say “what happened to the campaign” it’s like well it wasn’t campaign in the first place. How can you say what happened to this that it wasn’t? I never know how to deal with that.

It was always a multiplayer game. It was a multiplayer game…top to bottom.” 

GameInformer followed up by asking how Treyarch feels about the community’s response to there being no campaign.

Dan Bunting stated, “We believe we’re making an awesome game. That vision started with building a game that is entirely constructed around social gameplay experiences is coming to life. And it is deeper and bigger than anything we’ve ever done. There’s more ways to play this game with your friends for longer than we’ve ever had before. Historically, we can make a really big campaign, 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 that the replay-ability is limited. We wanted to make a game that players would keep playing for a long time because that’s something we are passionate about and play ourselves.” 

GameInformer also asked if it was ‘easy’ to plug in a Battle Royale mode because of the genre’s popularity without the game having a campaign, but Vahn replied that ‘it was not easy, as you suggest.’ 

You watch the interview here.