Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 wasn’t exactly in fans’ favor from the start. The community didn’t really like the shooter’s hackneyed future setting in 2016. After Advanced Warfare, Infinite Warfare, and the World War II scenario in WW2, the calls for a switch back to Modern Warfare grew louder. The lack of a story mode also played a big role in the title’s poor showing. After all, the entertaining, gripping action of the CoD campaigns still provides thrills and gaming fun time and again. This coming October, six years will have passed since the release of Black Ops 4, and now, so long after, leaks have hit the web that show what developer studio Treyarch had planned as a campaign.

What was the gameplay supposed to look like?

Reddit user PurpleToaster20 posted over 400 images, story scripts and other first impressions of the game. An approximately 30-minute video is also scheduled to be released on August 18, which will go into even more detail about the leaked footage. The goal for Black Ops 4 was to pack the usual action of CoD campaigns into an exciting 2-against-2 mode. In a kind of race, two teams were supposed to compete against each other and get to the end of the mission as fast as possible. 15-20 minutes were planned for one mission.

While the two teams of two were rushing towards the finish line, the AI would have been tasked with disrupting and perhaps even stopping the run. In addition, random events were to ensure that the paths of the competing squads crossed again and again, providing even more spectacle.

There would even have been repercussions for the rest of the campaign, depending on which team would have emerged victorious from the mission. But as we know by now, this interesting mode didn’t make it into the game even after the fact.

Why wasn’t the idea implemented?

After announcing that Black Ops 4 would be launched without a single-player campaign, Treyarch and Activision received a fair amount of headwind from the community. For this reason, the companies worked on a subsequent solution, but the result was not satisfactory from their point of view.

According to Treyarch, the implementation of a campaign also no longer fit the evolution of the CoD series. After all, this was supposed to be developed further, especially in the multiplayer area. In retrospect, rather a misjudgment of the development studio.

What’s next for the series?

After all, Call of Duty’s campaigns are still quite popular. No other shooter series captures the fast-paced gameplay as well as CoD. Modern Warfare 2, which will be released at the end of October, also has a single-player mode again.

As Captain Price, Gaz, Soap and Ghost, it’s once again time to free the world from terrorists. In our preview, we have already taken a first look at the campaign around Task Force 141.