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Call of Duty: how Black Ops 4 is jumping on the battle royale wagon

There’s a new Call of Duty game on the horizon and it could be a major break from gaming tradition.

The popular franchise is releasing its new game later this year, Call of Duty: Black Ops 4, but, the new game may not feature single-player mode as previous instalments have in the past.

According to Polygon, Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 will instead have a battle royale mode.

Call of Duty’s creator, Activision, is keeping quiet on the rumours. A spokesperson said: “We don’t comment on rumour and speculation. We look forward to revealing Black Ops 4 on May 17th.”

Will Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 be a new battle royale game?

Battle royale mode is the new era of gaming we’ve come to live with.

Populated by games such as PlayerUnknownBattleground and Fortnite, battle royale mode sees players tackling 99 other gamers at the same time in a fight to the end.

Battle royale-style games are immensely popular at the moment. When Fortnite Battle Royale first hit mobile, the game made over $1.5 million in in-app purchases in one week.

Epic, Fortnite’s developers, regularly need to take the game offline to upgrade its servers due to the popularity of the game.

PlayerUnknownBattlerground (PUBG), Fortnite’s major competitor, is making the game free to play for Xbox Live Gold members this weekend in order to get more fans involved.

From 8.01am today (Thursday 19 April) until 7:59am on Monday 23 April, PUBG will be available for players to download from the store.

While it makes sense, due to the popularity of these games, that Call of Duty wants to get involved, it might not go down so well with the fans.

Gamers used Twitter to express their distress at losing one of the major features of Call of Duty games, single-player mode.

If anything, there is a sense that gamers could become bored with the battle royale mode. Another battle royale game, Radical Heights, came out last week.

Developers Boss Key Productions rushed out the game after only five months in production in order to capitalise on the battle royale hype, meaning the game is relatively unfinished.

However, Boss Key said it wants to involve the community of players in making Radical Heights a better gaming experience.

For now, we’ll have to wait until 17 May for the Black Ops 4 reveal but, if early reactions are anything to go by, fans will not be happy with this change.