After leaks and rumors, Treyarch confirmed that Call of Duty: Black Ops IIII will have a battle royale mode. The specifics of CoD’s take on the insanely popular battle royale mode/genre have yet to be released, but CoD will have to adapt heavily to make this mode work.
Where’s Battle Royale In Call of Duty?
Fortnite and PUBG are reigning supreme in the multiplayer space. A portion of Fortnite’s success can be attributed to its entry cost of zero dollars, but if the game wasn’t hooking people, it wouldn’t have stuck around as long as it has. While Epic games is not an indie developer by any stretch, they not quite AAA. Epic initially found success as the developers behind Gears of War, but their true bread and butter is engine development. So as far as I am concerned, Blackout will be the first AAA attempt at the battle royale game type. The success of this iteration will heavily determine the longevity of battle royale as a game mode. As a genre, battle royale is here to stay, but PUBG was built to be a battle royale game, and Fortnite began transitioning to the genre early on in its early access cycle. We haven’t seen an established IP try to mix its mechanics with the iconic battle royale mechanics. So what will a Call of Duty battle royale even be like? Just standard Call of Duty on a big map with 100 players will not be enough.
What Are They Aiming For?
CoD’s snappy shotting is one of its major pillars. Even incredibly polished FPSs like OVerwatch and Titanfall don’t feel as smooth and satisfying as shooting in CoD. A huge factor in that shooting is hitscan. Shooters use two main kinds of hit detection. Hit scan and real projectile. Hit scan simply scans if your reticle is over an enemy when you pull the trigger and registers a hit. Real projectile calculates effects such as bullet velocity and bullet drop. The varying degrees of realism on real projectiles depends on the game, but that’s the basic idea. In Fortnite, the shotguns are hitscan while every other weapon is a real projectile. Call of Duty has used hitscan for all of its guns, but battle royale demands a real projectile system. Being able to snipe clear across the entire map in CoD is fine when the map is mostly corridors. But, battle royale maps are far more open, making long-range hitscan weapons overpowered. So if Treyarch wants to do a traditional battle royale, they will have to at least partially abandon hitscan. That would be a huge shift for CoD players. One they might not care for.
And That’s Just One Mechanic…
The defining characteristics of CoD are at fundamental odds with how battle royale games have been designed so far. Battle royale is defined by long periods of quiet interrupted by flashes of combat. Call of Duty is chaotic, noisy, and messy. Battle royale is methodical. CoD thrives on twitch reflex shooting and tight corridors. Battle royale lives on strategizing how to cross large open spaces. CoD emphasizes customized loadouts, battle royale is about working with what you can find. This could lead to more CoD type loot on the field in Blackout. Instead of just guns and armor, you could pick up perks or even killstreaks. But again, those kill streaks would have to be fundamentally altered to work in battle royale. A Call of Duty battle royale is an oxymoron. For Call of Duty to work as a battle royale, it will have to either change what “Battle royale” is or alter its own mechanics to the point that it wouldn’t be recognizable as Call of Duty.
Let’s See What They Can Do
This doesn’t mean I’m angry or not excited that this is happening, however. I am very interested to see how Treyarch tries to marry these two disparate game types. I can’t see a way forward, but I’m not a game developer. As PUBG dominated gaming discussion we all knew that AAA publishers weren’t going to sleep on this mode. And now we’re on the verge of seeing the first AAA attempt at adding battle royale to their game rather than building the game with battle royale in mind. Shooters, especially Call of Duty, have needed a huge shakeup for years, and now we might be getting it. Hopefully, we’ll get a better idea of what Blackout is at E3.