The internet website Polygon has apparently received some sort of news that there will be no Black Ops 4 campaign in the next Call of Duty Black Ops game. While campaigns have never been the actual focus of Call of Duty games for many players, this is an entirely new thing.
Multiplayer has always been the most important part of Call of Duty for many people, ever since Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare came out and catapulted the series to become a multiplayer juggernaut along the lines of Halo and Battlefield. Since then, the campaigns of the games have been second fiddle to the cool multiplayer toys players could get their hands on.
With the possibility of no Black Ops 4 campaign, Call of Duty (or at least Treyarch’s games in the cycle between them, Infinity Ward, and Sledgehammer) will be taking a fairly big step, with no story to justify all of the cool toys beyond some sort of framing device.
It could also be a method of trying to avoid the pitfalls that Infinite Warfare’s story dropped it into. While the game didn’t have good multiplayer to begin with, its setting was a huge disappointment to many people, who were tired of the “modern” aspect of Call of Duty going further and further into the future.
If Black Ops 4 takes a leaf out of Sledgehammer’s book and decides to go backward in time, we may be looking at a multiplayer setting that takes place in Vietnam, which was where the meat of the story for Call of Duty Black Ops took place. However, there’s no guarantee that Polygon’s reporting is actually accurate; even if Black Ops 4 goes farther into the future, we’ll likely get at least some kind of campaign.
Either way, we’ll just have to see if there will be no Black Ops 4 campaign in the future, and Treyarch will likely tell us sometime in the future, possibly at E3.
