I don't think rumors are even worth the grain of salt you're supposed to take them with, but this one in particular has me too giddy to just ignore it.
Per Polygon, and a bunch of other sites operating under the same sources, this fall's Call of Duty - Black Ops 4 - will not feature a traditional single player campaign. It's a departure for the series that cut its teeth being a war simulator, telling sweeping single player stories that, for a while, set the bar for console shooters.
But there's an overlooked word that appears in the report, and that word is "traditional". That can be a pretty loaded word, so let's take a quick second to unpack it.
'Traditional' in regards to Call of Duty means an 8-10 hour narrative-based campaign, full of over-the-top set pieces and something that'll tie into the greater Black Ops continuity that's been building since 2010.
And yeah, I'm going to miss playing a Call of Duty campaign this fall, like I have pretty much every fall since 2007. I fucking love Call of Duty campaigns. They're loud, they're dumb, they're fun, and they feel so damn good.
But Battlefield One had a non-traditional campaign. Star Wars Battlefront II (2005) had a non-traditional campaign. Civilization V. Even Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare wasn't really a traditional campaign. Lots of games have non-traditional campaigns, and some of them are really fucking good, so there's no real reason to assume Call of Duty Black Ops IV won't be one of them, if this rumor turns out to be true.
Even Call of Duty Ghosts had Riley
It's silly to assume, because whether you like Call of Duty or not, no one can say they're bad games. Even the worst Call of Duty games are still pretty good games. It's like Pixar - Pixar's worst movie (I'm lookin' at you, Cars 2) is still more fun than 85% of everything else out there.
But I said at the top of this thing that I'm excited and that's because Activision and 72 and Sunny (the agency of record for Call of Duty) are in pretty rarified air for annualized franchises: they can do something new.
Like it or not, a Call of Duty game releasing without a traditional single player campaign is a new product. Without leaning on the likenesses of Kit Harrington or Kevin Spacey to get people invested in a narrative like past advertising blitzes, they have to do something new to get people's attention in what's not just a crowded market, but a market that's leaning heavily towards F2P 9free-to-play) games like Fortnite and Warframe.
Drake and some dude named Ninja had 500,000+ concurrent pairs of eyes watching this game a few weeks ago. The future is free-to-play and the revolution will be streamed.
They have to explain why something that was included with the $60 product you bought last year, and every year before that, isn't there. And to do that, they have to/can do one of the following things
A) sell their multiplayer as the single best online multiplayer experience of the year (compete against Fortnite / PUBG / others)
B) lower the price to compensate for less product (doubt it)
C) Create something new to replace missing feature (Battlefield One style vignettes, co-op elements like Spec-Ops)
D) Transition to the seasonal model of F2P games, Turning Call of Duty into a platform (doubt it)
E) Include Modern Warfare 2 / Black Ops / Black Ops II Remastered as the SP offering (unlikely, why call it Black Ops IV then?)
F) Act like nothing is different
Activision isn't stupid. If they're not including a traditional AAA style narrative based single player campaign, it's because they feel like the juice isn't worth the squeeze. They have analytics. They know just how much time people spend in their campaigns, how far they get, and what the ratio is of time invested in single player to multiplayer.
Seeing the success of properties like Destiny or The Division, they're probably opting for what used to be in the game before the survival mode stuff took off - small, focused cooperative missions with a score system to encourage re-playability, or something with drops like Destiny, again to encourage re-playability.
And they should. Because people by-and-large aren't touching their single player stories, so why should Activision pay money for something most people don't even touch?
"George, how could you possibly know that nobody is playing Call of Duty's campai-" MATH, YOU SAVAGE.
Y'all got some New Balances or some Dansko's on? 'Cause we're about to go for a walk.
As of January 2018, Call of Duty WWII, the most recent entry has sold about 10.87 million units (at retail, this does not include digital sales, which aren't reported).
And as of about November 2017, the PlayStation 4 has roughly 69 million units (nice) out in the wild. Xbox One has about 34 million, add that up, you get 103 million, which we're going to round to a cool 100 and PlayStation 4 to a cool 70 million units because even though I love Good Will Hunting, I am most certainly not Good Will Hunting, and most maths hurt my brain.
Obviously the following figures are not exact.
So, let's assume that about 7 million of the near 11 million people who bought it, did so on PlayStation 4.
PSNprofiles.com is a site for hardcore game nerds - it lets them track, compare, tabulate, and plan out the trophies for everything in the PlayStation ecosystem. You have to give a shit about games to even know about it, let alone sign up for it; it's made for people who want to 100%, or damn near it, their games. But, something it, and you, have access to is something pretty interesting: the trophy data for every PlayStation 4 user. It lets you compare to the average PlayStation user.
This doesn't just give us the data for users - this gives us the difference between users and likely users - the hardcore fans who own a PS4 and signed up for PSN Profiles, and the people who simply own a PS4.
Of those 7 million people, 50.08% of every PlayStation user completed the first level. 57.99% of PSN Profile holders - the people who are supposed to give the most shit - completed the first level. Only 31.35% of those PSN Profile holders even finished the campaign outright, and 24.5% of PlayStation users made it that far at all.
A quarter of 7 million is a lot of people. But three quarters of 7 million people is a lot, lot more.
No, really. It's 3x as many.
Right? I'm almost entirely certain that my math is maybe kind of right. But in college the only math course I took was "Word Problems" so, who's to say? No one's to say, because I turned off comments. Let it Rain, Man.
But if that's the case - if only 50-60% of the people who bought your game bothered to finish the first level, and if only about 25-30% of people who bought your game are bothered to finish it at all, then what's the point of them throwing good money after a ton more of good money that people couldn't even pretend to give a shit about last year?
That's why what Call of Duty's doing, this rumored change, is so fucking exciting. It's giving itself a chance to convince people it's the pinnacle again, it's got the chance to shout "HEY BITCHES, WE GOT SOMETHING FRESH OVER HERE". There was a time when online multiplayer was new. There was a time when battle royale modes were new. This new game needs a chance to at least stretch its legs before you can say it's shitty at making the run towards first place.
And of course I'm bummed to see the traditional single player campaigns go, but that's not to say they're not being replaced by something better. I'm ready for y'all to wow me, Call of Duty.