The year is winding down and the most anticipated releases are rolling out! Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 has been the source of both excitement and doubt for gamers since the announcement of an online-only game without a single player experience. Before we get our hands on the title, let’s take a look back at what has lead to this upcoming release and check out the history of the Black Ops franchise.
In 2009, Treyarch began development on Call of Duty: Black Ops as the successor to World at War. during the game’s development, Treyarch used several different teams to focus on specific games modes for the finished product. The team also implemented motion capture technology to replicate facial features and movement to fully capture the actors’ performances. Treyarch also consulted several ex-special forces personnel from the Cold War era to research real-world combat tactics that would be used in specific circumstances. The game was released on PC, Playstation 3, Xbox 360 and Wii November 9, 2010.
The game takes place between 1961 and 1968 during the Cold War era and was a successor to the previous title World at War. The campaign revolves around players stopping a sleeper cell embedded in America with control over a deadly nerve gas, Nova-6. Through the use of a sequence of numbers shown to sleeper agents, they will activate and release the deadly gas. To prepare for the event, the U.S. is preparing a pre-emptive nuclear strike that would inevitably cause World War 3. The team of special forces must take out the transmission stations before they are activated to stop the world ending plan before it is implemented.
In November of 2011, Activision Blizzard announced that they were working on a new Call of Duty game slated for a 2012 release. While many leaks began to spill out at the beginning of 2012, the official announcement of Black Ops II came on April 23 and promised a fictional 21st century Cold War setting. During development, Activision was intently focused on revising the multiplayer mechanics for the new iteration of the franchise including multi-team matches, a focus on objective based gameplay and a new matchmaking system that would help pair players together based on their player skill. After its release on November 13, 2012, It was the highest grossing entertainment launch of all time until Grand Theft Auto 5 dethroned it a few months later in 2013.
In 2015 the official confirmation came that Black Ops III was currently in development to match the various developers three-year release cycle for the various Call of Duty titles. Alongside of the current generation of consoles, the title was also being developed for PS3 and Xbox 360 but with missing features which included the game’s campaign.
We can’t take a full look at the Black Ops franchise without taking a look at one of the tentpoles of the series, the wave-based Zombie mode. While Black Ops was not the first Call of Duty to introduce the zombie horde mode, it has become synonymous with the series. Players take control of survivors which vary from standard grunts to world leaders and are thrown onto a map where points are earned by killing zombies and used as currency to buy new weapons and unlock new areas within the map.
A Nintendo Switch trailer was also released.
According to SteamDB.
An announcement trailer was also released.