Team Spirit

Multiplayer leads the way in BLACK OPS 4, a thoroughly modern take on the CALL OF DUTY series.

- Andy Kelly

The rumors are true: The traditional Call of Duty singleplayer campaign is dead. There’s no lavish, indulgent six-hour collection of cinematic story missions in Black Ops 4. Now the story is threaded into multiplayer, the mode that, let’s be honest, is the real reason that fans of the series keep buying it year after year. It’s a bold, and perhaps inevitable, move by developer Treyarch, but for the veteran Call of Duty studio it’s just another way of telling a story.

“If you’ve been following the Black Ops series, you’ll know that we never tell a story the same way twice,” says co-studio head Dan Bunting. “In the first game, your companion throughout the campaign was a figment of your imagination. In the second game, we told a branching story. And in Black Ops 3 the whole thing was all in the main character’s head. So we’ve always experimented with telling stories in different ways.”

It’s also clear that Treyarch knows the time and money it spends making a Call of Duty campaign, versus the time players actually spend playing it, doesn’t quite balance out. “We’re putting a lot more energy into the parts of the game where our players spend the most time,” says Bunting. “When you think of Treyarch you think of Zombies and multiplayer, so those are the parts of Black Ops that we want to bring to the forefront.”