Black Ops 4 included the Blackout battle royale mode, which turned out to be a polished take on the formula that worked really well. But Blackout won’t be part of this year’s Modern Warfare reboot, and it sounds like the developer at Infinity Ward didn’t consider including it. At the multiplayer reveal this week, Joe Cecot, the multiplayer design director, told IGN that Modern Warfare and Black Ops 4 just have very different vibes.“We really focused on Modern Warfare, authentic and gritty, realistic weapons, and it’s a different experience. It’s really…just about pulling back to Modern Warfare and keeping that pure,” Cecot said.
So no Blackout, but will Modern Warfare have any kind of battle royale mode? Joe told IGN “[Infinity Ward has] big fans of battle royale. We’re excited for large player counts and things like that, but right now we’re really focused on core multiplayer.”
Part of that core multiplayer is a long-standing Call of Duty mode called Ground War. This week Infinity Ward showed off 20v20 gameplay (and IGN’s Miranda Sanchez went hands-on with it), but in the future, they’re shooting for Ground War to host over 100 players. 100 players is a nice number for a battle royale mode, but based on Cecot’s comments, it sounds like that isn’t part of the plan for Modern Warfare right now.
Even though Blackout allowed for 100 players, three digits would be a first for Call of Duty’s core multiplayer mode. The developers are really excited about this larger player count.
“We have pushed our networking engineers to allow us to have more players,” Cecot said. “On the technical side, we’ve had to do a ton of work on the multiplayer side to make things more efficient so we could push the player counts higher and higher and higher.”
Blackout is definitely not going to be a part of Modern Warfare, and there aren’t currently any plans to add a battle royale mode. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare is getting a beta next month, though. The reimagining is out October 25th. Until then, be sure to check out our impressions on the 2v2 Gunfight mode and Infinity Ward’s comments on the white phosphorus controversy.
Reporting by Miranda Sanchez.
Daemon Hatfield is Host & Producer at IGN. You can catch him hosting Game Scoop every week.
