Does Black Ops 4 have a Campaign?

Modified Feb 06, 2025 10:16 GMT

A character in Black Ops 4 holding a pistol as she is chased by zombies — Exploring whether Black Ops 4 includes a campaign mode (Image via Activision)

Unfortunately, no, Black Ops 4 does NOT have a Campaign mode. The game was released back in 2018 and featured three modes — Multiplayer, Zombies, and Blackout. In fact, it is the first and the last game in the Call of Duty franchise to not feature a single-player Campaign mode. If players wanted a narrative experience, their best bet was the Zombies mode, which had pretty good lore with interesting characters.

Check out the section below to learn more about why Black Ops 4 doesn't have a Campaign.

Why Black Ops 4 does not have a Campaign?

The decision to not include a Campaign mode in Black Ops 4 was deliberate, and the developers had discussed this in detail. The development for the game was led by Treyarch, and the co-studio head, Dan Bunting, discussed the following about their decision to not build a Campaign:

"Going back to the very beginning of Black Ops 4 development, we never had set out to make a traditional campaign. We always started from the place of, we're going to make something different with this game that was going to be inspired by how our community was interacting with Black Ops III and the games over the years."

According to Dan, there was never a plan in place to curate a traditional Call of Duty Campaign for the game. They examined how the community responded to Black Ops 3 and the past entries, which ultimately led to the decision to skip the Campaign mode completely.

Speaking about their observations from the past entries, they stated the following:

"We see more and more players spending more time with multiplayer and zombies, not just in the game, but out of the game, streaming and talking about it in forums. It's generated a really huge crowd response. The decision was, we wanted to make a different style of game this time."

They mentioned that back then, their team observed players discussing the title's Multiplayer and Zombies modes more than the Campaign. Based on this feedback from players, the developers chose to make a Call of Duty title that stood out from the rest of the installments in the series.

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Adding to their statement of delivering fans a Call of Duty experience never seen before, they had to say the following:

"Throughout the course of development, we tried a lot of ideas, a lot of things that challenged convention, that might be a different kind of twist on how we might think of a Call of Duty game in the past, or a Black Ops game in the past."

They revealed that during Black Ops 4 development, the team played around with a lot of different ideas and challenged the norms for the series. The goal here was to give players something that was completely unexpected from a Call of Duty title or a Black Ops game.

Hence, Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 never saw a single-player Campaign and was instead released with a robust Multiplayer experience, a narrative-driven Zombies mode, and the first battle royale mode in the Call of Duty series, called Blackout.

That covers everything that you need to know about why Black Ops 4 doesn't have a Campaign.

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Edited by Ripunjay Gaba