Rumor: CoD IIII Singleplayer axed for Battle Royale

[Bofferbrauer2]

EricHiggin said:

Bofferbrauer2 said:

I would rather say that with both PUBG and Fortnite, the Battle Royale genre really exploded in popularity and both EA and Activision Blizzard wanted to cash in on that undependently. And the reason why the Singleplayer would be dropped is simply because they wouldn't have had the ressources to do both in time for the release. Besides, cutting the Singleplayer really cuts down the production budget too, with all the celebrity voice-actors not being needed anymore, so it's doubly beneficial for EA

Well beneficial financially is a no brainer if they still charge full price at launch, which is most likely, or charge for it later as DLC. While the BOIIII launch date is earlier than normal by a month, I have a really hard time believing that after 3 years of development, that a month is going to mean dropping the campaign completely. Now if your aiming to add battle royale mode, then sure, dropping the campaign makes more sense, but only if both franchises do it. If BFV has a campaign, even a short one, and BOIIII doesn't, then dropping the campaign was clearly a horribly late decision or a money grab. If it's because of a late decision, I would bet it has to do more with BFV having a battle royale mode than it does PUBG and Fortnite.

That would mean only starting working on it right now, meaning they only would have about 5 months, including creating the necessary concepts, maps, characters, character design, balancing, et cetera, and that's just too short to do it all. They must have started it some months before, probably even in last year after the release of Fortnite on consoles in September. It's quite possible that they where working on both the BR and the Storymode, only to find out one of both needed to be cut to finish the game in time, and BF V's BR announcement made for the perfect time to announce the cut on their side basically by making it look like an answer to it.

With Battle Royale having become so huge in such a short time, it sounds to me more like a bet from Activision Blizzard that they would gain more (DLC paying) players with the Battle Royale than losing for not having a story campaign or any other singleplayer mode.