Trivia / Call of Duty: Black Ops 4

• Dueling Games: The Blackout mode is a Battle Royale mode (a first for the Call of Duty series) made to counter the popularity of PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds and Fortnite.
• Franchise Killer: Very minor example, Call of Duty is still a juggernaut of a franchise, but the overall mixed reception of this particular installment meant that the next games underwent something of a Continuity Reboot and Shared Universe.
• Executive Meddling: According to the person that leaked the game before its official reveal, the game was going to have a single player campaign and its multiplayer mode was more in line with Overwatch. However, pressure from Activision to include a Battle Royale mode and their dislike of the similarities with Overwatch forced them to scrap the entire single player campaign, redesign the multiplayer mode to be more similar to Black Ops II but with the specialists' abilities and develop the Battle Royale mode; Blackout, under half a year.
• What Could Have Been
  • Originallym the game was going to have an asymmetrical story campaign called Career Mode, where teams of two (the Free People's Army and the World United Nations) would compete to complete various objectives in a Quicksand Box with branching paths depending on the winner of the match. However, many testers felt it was too repetitive and got boring fast and was scrapped late into development, forcing Treyarch to attempt to redo the campaign in the style of past games (story-driven missions with setpieces).
  • The second attempt at a campaign would have dealt with younger versions of Black Ops III's specialists working for one of David Mason's daughters following a wave of terrorist attacks across the world. It would be revealed that she was Evil All Along and the Big Bad of the story. Some of the cutscenes that were made can be unlocked in the game.

---