A new Call of Duty will come out this year, what happens to Blackout?
Call of Duty is unique in most esports in that a new game comes out each year and the league is forced to adapt and change to the new weapons and meta of the game. This has been good for the series for the most part because it keeps things interesting year after year. The downside is that you occasionally get Call of Duty Advanced Warfare or Call of Duty World War II. Crap games. That’s what can happen when you have game developers switching on and off making games.
This year the gap between Infinity Ward/Sledgehammer Games and Treyarch has grown bigger in recent years. Coming off of a lackluster World War II, Call of Duty as a franchise was in an odd place. Twitch and YouTube viewership was down, the esport itself was in an odd place, and typical Call of Duty content creators seemed to be moving on. Then came Black Ops 4 and Blackout.
Blackout is the singlehandedly most impressive thing a Call of Duty game has pulled off in years. When news of a COD Battle Royale came out there were those that were blindly hopeful and the skeptics. Frankly, I was just quietly hoping that the game wouldn’t be horrible.
As it turned out Blackout pulled off what was almost impossible. In my eyes, they kept some of the best qualities of Call of Duty and laced it with the fun aspects of PUBG. Not to say PUBG is bad, but the mechanics of it just weren’t smooth enough for me and the end game was far too slow.
They’re doing a decent enough job of patching the game. There are still glitches here and there but the game performs well enough on a consistent basis. The biggest question I still have with the game is its sustainability.
Call of Duty’s new game, whatever it will be called, comes out later this year and will obviously be a new chapter for most players. Given how the CoD Pro League works, pro players and most streamers will be forced to move on to a new CoD, and Black Ops 4 will be an afterthought. Which spells the end of Blackout.
My main hope is that the success and mostly positive vibes that have surrounded Blackout will motivate CoD Devs and decision makers to continue making a CoD BR experience yearly instead of the always quick to conquer campaign mode. If this is the one year Call of Duty is able to make a fun BR mode, then I’m going to cherish this game more then I realize now. The fun that I have with friends on this game is unmatched in Call of Duty’s since Modern Warfare 3. That fun is spurred on by the ability to switch between a great multiplayer and Blackout. It really does feel like having two games in one, which keeps the fun going when frustration sets in on one of the modes.
Because of how CoD works every year, Blackout’s future will wain once Modern Warfare 4, or whatever they’re trying to call it, comes out this year, and hopefully, that’ll be okay. If the next Call of Duty figures out a way to make a sustainable game that’s player-friendly and enjoyable repeatedly, then saying goodbye to Blackout later this year is okay.
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