It’s the question that everybody has been asking since it was announced that Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 will feature a battle-royale mode known as Blackout. How many players per match will Blackout hold?
Today, we can confirm that the answer to that question is 80. During the beta at least, which starts on PS4 on Monday 10th September.
Confirmation of this came from Treyarch co-studio head Dan Bunting and studio design director David Vonderhaar during a recent trip to the Treyarch studios by Game Informer, where they informed Game Informer about their game so that Game Informer could inform us about the game. During this massive informing session, Treyarch also revealed that they had tested the game mode internally with 100 players—the same number of players as Fortnite and PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds—but had decided to prioritise gameplay over hitting an arbitrary number.
David Vonderhaar said, “What’s really more important to us than a number is that the gameplay experience is as refined as it can be, that’s it the ideal perfect format for what players are going to play. So we’re starting with 80 players, but we’ve gone higher than that. Whenever we launch a game as a beta or whatever, that’s the beginning of something. We’re going to actively be participating in the community and taking feedback, making changes and adapting, evolving the game as feedback rolls in. So there’s a lot that can go on that can happen beyond that first impact of the game going out there.”
The interesting thing to note there is that they’re starting with 80 players. It would seem that Treyarch will be keeping a close eye on how the community responds to this and could hike the player count up, or even lower it for that matter.
More Blackout details have also emerged today, as it was revealed that players will be able to travel the map in a Cargo Truck (Land – holds one driver and four passengers), on an ATV (Land – holds one driver and one passenger), on a Zodiac Inflatable Boat (Sea – one pilot, three passengers) or in a Little Bird Helicopter (Air – one pilot, four passengers).
In other exciting news—and in a move designed to differentiate itself from the crowd—it was confirmed that Blackout mode will also feature AI controlled Zombies.
Let the madness commence.
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