When the makers of Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 announced yesterday that the upcoming game will come with its very own battle royale mode, Blackout, they refrained from answering one big question: How many people will it support? The answer, it appears, is that developer Treyarch just doesn’t know yet.
Fortnite and PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds are the two top games in the “drop a bunch of people on a map and make them kill each other until there’s just one left” genre. They both support 100 players per match.
Back when we first heard that Black Ops 4 was getting a battle royale mode, however, we heard from a person familiar with development of the game that the developers had not yet been able to replicate that. Now that Blackout is official, Treyarch has been vague.
“No, we’re not saying how many players,” Treyarch studio director David Vonderhaar told Kotaku features editor Chris Kohler when he asked yesterday at the world premiere event in Los Angeles. “We’re working on trying to figure out what the exact right magic number is for a battle royale game in the Black Ops universe… I’ll tell you what. If you look at the video that we showed, and you play it back, I think you’ll find your answer. You’ll possibly find your answer if you do some sleuthing. Maybe.”
So there’s one option. Count the number of yellow dots here:
Or maybe don’t, because that probably won’t give you an answer either. Treyarch was equally frustrating in its response to Eurogamer, with co-studio head Dan Bunting telling the outlet that Blackout‘s player count will be “multiples higher than the highest we’ve ever done.”
What does that mean? Who knows? I asked Activision for elaboration today and the publisher sent over this statement, also attributed to Bunting:
Yesterday, we revealed Blackout, a massive new battle royale experience coming in Black Ops 4 at launch, October 12. Blackout delivers an experience that’s uniquely Black Ops featuring characters, weapons and gear from across the series on the biggest map ever in the franchise — over 1500 times greater than Nuketown and a player count that is an order of magnitude above anything previously in Call of Duty.
We’re deep in development and actively playtesting to optimise the gameplay to deliver a final player count that gives fans what they expect from a Black Ops experience, and we look forward to sharing more with the community soon.
In other words: ¯_(ツ)_/¯
Comments
7 responses to “Nobody Is Saying How Many People Call Of Duty’s Battle Royale Will Support”
Honestly if it’s any less than 100 it’s going to be seen as a huge stumble
A hundred in a map smaller than Fortnite would be a clusterfuck.
I would love it.
If they can keep the visual integrity that the other modes have with a 100 player Battle Royale mode it’ll be impressive.
Holy crap that’s vague.
“Maybe if you count all the dots you can figure out how many players….maybe, I dunno”
The initial reaction is that it needs to be 100 players but in a game with COD’s speed it doesn’t need to be 100. 60 players would be enough for it to be entertaining.
If they were to do away with half of PUBG’s boring midgame, it’d still be a tight experience.
If you count the dots it’s roughly 132 maybe 133
I couldn’t tell how many were in the built up areas and a few dots are different shades of yellow
https://imgur.com/a/9yBHxOF
They have always been terrible with player counts, it wouldn’t surprise me if their battle royale mode was 1v11 and then they made up some ridiculous reason why this was better than Fortnite and PUBG.
With COD I wouldn’t be surprised if their battle royale mode featured respawning and was just essentially free for all in a big map with 24 players.
I’m not sure any of the small playercount Battle Royale’s have gotten traction. Whilst I could see a smaller map, lower player count, but faster pace game be interesting, I severely doubt that, at a AAA priced game, its going to dethrone any of the big ones. Maybe on PS4 it might get traction because it doesn’t have PUBG?