We don’t know much about Call of Duty: Black Ops 4’s battle-royale mode “Blackout,” but we do know at one point developer Treyarch was toying around with a massive map for it.
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As you would expect, in the build-up to Blackout, Treyarch have spent a great deal of time and resources experimenting with the mode to see how it can fit into the Call of Duty franchise. What does battle-royale look like in Call of Duty? It’s these type of questions the developer spent considerable time trying to figure out.
During these stages of experimentation, Treyarch apparently tested the mode with an 144 square mile map, aka a map 12 miles by 12 miles. If that sounds massive, it’s because it is. It’s really, really massive.
“We have invested a huge amount of our development energy into those tools,” said Game Director Dan Bunting in an interview with Newsweek. “They can basically paint terrain down in massive, massive spaces. We had a test map of 12 miles by 12 miles as the biggest space we were able to build and run.”
Obviously, the final product of Blackout is very, very, very unlikely to contain a map of this size, mostly due to the fact that Treyarch is committed to a silky 60fps, which would be near impossible to achieve on a map of that size, especially at the detailed resolution levels the game offers.
However, what it does potentially reveal is that the map may be bigger than expected. Call of Duty maps have notoriously shrunk over the years, so many expect Blackout to be a compact-take on battle-royale. But if Treyarch was messing around with such massive maps, it’s possible they landed on something not quite that huge, but still pretty big.
At the end of the day, all we can do is speculate. But perhaps we won’t have to for much longer: with E3 around the corner, we may have more Blackout information soon.
Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 is in development for PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC. It is expected to release worldwide on October 12th.
For more information and media on Black Ops 4, click here.
