When this game was released, Black Ops 4 was a super controversial game. Number One because of how buggy it was at launch and 2 because while it may have been a return to boots on the ground it was set in a hyper futuristic setting and was missing a campaign mode entirely.
The reason I liked this game so much is that it struck the perfect balance between high skill gameplay while still providing a casual experience. This is in part due to the variety of game modes but also the lack of strict skill based matchmaking. The maps were colorful and interesting and the gunplay was fantastic. For the first time in call of duty weapons actually had a little bit of a recoil with consistent recoil patterns that you could learn. Not to mention, for the most part the weapons were also very balanced. The guns were diverse in how they performed and certain weapons really catered to specific playstyles. You had some weapons that were great for mobility, some that were great at long range gun fights and some that were great up close. Each weapon had its own unique personality and I think that was in large part due to the fact that we hadn’t been introduced to the gunsmith system yet. In black ops 4 we had the classic pick 10 system where you could really tailor your loadout to your playstyle. You could give up attachments on your gun for more perks and vice versa. One of my biggest critiques of newer call of duty titles is the gunsmith. I think it’s a really cool idea but unfortunately every weapon tends to feel the same. You build the rifles to minimize recoil and do the most damage over distance and the SMG’s get kitted for mobility and the fastest TTK up close. In many cases I couldn’t tell them apart if the weapon models were all the same.
The map design was solid with Treyarch bringing their classic 3 lane style with just enough variety to keep it interesting. I do think some of the maps could have had a bit more space to them but overall I much prefer this map design philosophy over whatever safe space BS we got in MW19. [show Joe Secot talking about safe spaces] By the end of the game's life cycle, with a full DLC release, we had 34 maps to play. Now I know some of them were locked behind a paywall for people that purchased the DLC but midway into the games life cycle they made a change where as long as one person in your party had the DLC you could play all the maps together. Helping to minimize splitting the player base.
One of my favorite parts about this game is it actually had a skill gap. Black Ops 4 kind of broke the mold a little bit with the longest TTK in any call of duty game and a brand new gameplay mechanic manual healing. You could no longer sit and wait to heal but instead you actually had to press a button to heal yourself with a stim shot. Some players liked this because it gave you a lot more control over your gameplay decision making and how you approached fights, while others weren't a fan of having to manually heal themselves. These two elements combined with the specialist abilities created a game where you actually had to learn and improve to consistently be on the top of the leaderboard. Understanding all the specialist abilities, how to play around them, use them to your advantage and how to counter them was a huge factor in determining whether your team won or lost the match. Now if you weren’t a big fan of abilities, Treyarch actually listened to community feedback adding in a barebones playlist with no abilities for the people who prefer a more classic call of duty experience. I personally enjoyed both versions of the game but the fact that you could choose your preferred style of gameplay really shows how much treyarch cares about their game and their players. During the games lifecycle the studio head, David Vonderhaar, was actively tweeting and responding to players about things in the game. They also did seasonal “briefings’ where Vonderhaar and other members of the dev team would talk about changes coming in the new season, explain design choices the team made and walk us through new content like multiplayer maps.
Now a large part of the reason I have a special place in my heart for Black Ops 4 is because it brought us the best Battle Royale Ever… Blackout [use blackout announcer with in game footage]. The game was just built for fun in so many different ways. The map was colorful & interesting, we had a traditional battle royale loot system with weapons, attachments and healing items & the lootable perks were amazing and super useful. You could also find useful equipment around the map like the sensor dart, trophy system or grapple hook. The sensor dart gave you a mini UAV wherever you placed it and the grapple hook gave you 5 grapples to help close the distance on a target, get away quickly or reposition to high ground. The grapple hook also helped you take advantage of the built in wingsuit that would deploy if you fell from a certain height. All of these gameplay mechanics led to some interesting plays and really made each game feel more unique.
There were also side missions to unlock some of the characters and plenty of challenges specific to blackout so not every game was solely about winning or getting the most kills. For a game that claims to market and cater to casuals you'd think that they would do more of this in new games, not less. To unlock certain characters or skins you had to find a special item in the game and once the item was in your inventory it would give you a mission to complete to unlock that character. Also if you killed someone with that item in their backpack you could loot that Item and continue the mission.
The locations in Blackout were fun and interesting to play and each season the map got new points of interest, weapon balances and sometimes a completely different theme all together. One season we had a dark zombies themed map with the water run red with blood. Another season we had the dam break flooding parts of the map and making it so you could drive boats in areas you otherwise couldn't have before. Treyarch also filled out sections of the map with fan favorite maps from older games like raid, nuketown and Hijacked. As well as some zombies maps like asylum, Lighthouse and buried. If you landed at a zombies location and killed all of the zombies the mystery box would open granting you access to rare loot and sometimes even a ray gun. The overall gameplay and map design encouraged players to move from place to place, looking for more or better loot and it didn’t punish players for moving through the game by giving campers a million hiding places. Treyarch also did something really smart that I wish Infinity ward would do with warzone. They gave the weapons unique stats for blackout, completely separate from how they performed in multiplayer. This allowed them to really fine tune the weapons for the best balance possible in each experience. For example, just because Maddix was great in multiplayer did not mean it would perform the same in blackout. They also added separate camos for multiplayer, blackout and zombies. So if you were a big player of let’s say blackout, when you went into multiplayer people would see your camo and know that you grinded blackout. Which adds a lot of progression and replay value to the game.
Black Ops 4 is the last time we would see a traditional prestige system that didn’t reset your level with each season. So no matter how much you played the game you could always keep working towards that master prestige. To get to the next prestige level you had to select the prestige option and agree to reset all of your progress from weapons and attachments. You were then granted one prestige key that you could spend to permanently unlock one item like your favorite weapon for example. This system made the game better in a few ways. It gave the game a ton of replay value because you could keep grinding the ranks and you could keep unlocking your weapons and attachments. You also knew that if you saw someone with a high prestige level that they had really put the work in and earned it. The second way that this improved the game is that it created weapon variety in your matches because not everyone had every gun unlocked at max level with every attachment. So the potential for each match to play differently was much higher when compared to the new “era” of call of duty, where most players are using the “Meta” weapon that their favorite youtuber told them to use. Now I know supply drops weren’t the most popular idea in the world but I really think the system Treyarch added in towards the end of the games life cycle was really solid and added an extra level of player progression. Instead of opening your supply drops as you earned them, you could save them up and trade them in for items you wanted in the game. So even if you hopped on to play the game a few times per week you knew you were always progressing towards something, be it the next prestige level, earning supply drops through daily challenges or just grinding out camos in one of the 3 game modes. Nowadays once you unlock the mastery camo there’s nothing left to do. You have everything that’s earnable and the only thing left is to buy store bundles.
We also had a variety of awesome cosmetics that were actually earnable. For starters dark matter in this game was fantastic. It was a red plasma looking camo and as you racked up kills during the game it would grow spikes on it. Black Ops 4 is also the first time we were introduced to both reactive camos and what are now known as “blueprints” but used to be called Mastercrafts.
I don’t think a single game has done weapon camos anywhere near as well as BO4. There are two key features of these reactive camos that made them particularly cool. Number 1, you had to earn each camo on each gun by completing a specific challenge and number 2 each reactive camo would evolve based on certain things in the game. One camo would add more skulls as you got headshots, one camo would change colors as you went on longer streaks and another one would change based on getting kills on the objective. This is just another feature that adds to the overall progression and replay value of the game. Completing challenges to unlock each reactive camo on all of the weapons in the game gives you more things to work towards. In the modern call of duty era, progression is dramatically underrated because at the end of the day, no matter how good the gameplay loop is, we as humans want to feel like we’re working towards something.
While I’ve spent this entire time talking about how awesome this game is, there are a few things that I would change to make it even better. First of all the fact that the battle royale game mode was locked behind purchasing the full game really hindered the popularity of Blackout, especially when compared to fortnite at the time. The other change that this game really needed was crossplay. This one explains itself. And Lastly, while blackout did a great job of adding in more casual friendly modes and limited time modes I think they needed a way to get your teammates back if they died. While I appreciate the more hardcore experience of having one life it often made the game punishing and difficult to play with friend of varying skill levels and often times if your whole squad was dead except for one person, the last one alive would either back out to queue again or full send it for high kills to end the game faster. This led to a lot of games dying off pretty early and the mid game being slow at times.
Overall I genuinely think that Black Ops 4 brought the most high quality content and gameplay we’ve seen in a long time. While no game is without its faults the good definitely outweighs the bad here. With a fantastic and rewarding multiplayer, progression systems that encourage genuine organic player retention and the best battle royale. Black Ops 4 is undeniably The best call of duty game we’ve ever had.
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