The Multiplayer experience in Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 has been built from the ground up to incorporate the core Black Ops experience, while cranking everything to the max. Treyarch Studio Co-Head Dan Bunting calls it, “Our most ambitious Multiplayer to date. It delivers grounded combat, tight gunplay, an authentic military feel, fluid and responsive controls, all wrapped in the most refined, team tactical experience we’ve ever delivered.”

To deliver that experience, Black Ops 4 has a lot of new and evolved features that we will touch on here. Read on for the details about Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 Multiplayer that have been revealed so far!

WEAPONS

Black Ops has always been about weapons, and with Black Ops 4 there are multiple improvements to the gun systems – more than Black Ops, Black Ops 2 and Black Ops 3 combined. Weapons now feel like a character unto themselves: barrels ooze smoke, muzzle flashes light up a room, bullet impacts are massive, and real 3D tracers will allow you to follow bullet paths back to their origin.

Weapons are revamped in Black Ops 4, and attachments are no longer shared across a class of weapons. Each weapon now has its own set of Attachments, including a special attachment type known as an Operator Mod. This is the ultimate expression of a gun’s profile and expands its capability in ways that go beyond its core function.

Additionally, Black Ops 4 will be the first game in the history of Call of Duty to feature a Predictive Pattern Recoil System. This will allow the player to make micro-adjustments while aiming and shooting, and will be unique to each weapon.

SPECIALISTS

Specialists are back in Black Ops 4 and are both new and reimagined. They also now have Special Issue Equipment that only they can equip in Create a Class, which will deliver unique capabilities for your team to reinforce tactical gameplay and present the opportunity to discover powerful combinations that work together.

Take Ruin for example. He’s back and this time he’s brought a Grapple Gun with him, giving him the unique ability to close gaps and get to the enemy faster. Combining the Grapple Gun into a Grav Slam has made the highlight reel in testing at Treyarch, and they can’t wait to see what you can do with it.

Specialists are powerful enough on their own, but when working as a team they become an unstoppable force.  With more narrative and character depth in Multiplayer than ever before, players will learn and master each of the Specialists in solo missions. These feature a series of fun, fast-paced trials that give a hands-on introduction to the new and returning Specialists, while exploring stories behind their identities and backgrounds inside of a Black Ops narrative.

HEALTH

Black Ops 4 is also making a change to how health works in the game, as it will no longer automatically regenerate. Players will manually trigger the healing process with a button press.

Additionally, health will be a cooldown which will force players to make tactical decisions about when and where to try and recover. Do you take cover and try to regain some health, or do you rush forward and hope to catch the enemy off guard while they are doing some healing of their own?

Black Ops 4 has added a new category in Create a Class called ‘Gear.’ Gear expands your defensive or tactical strengths, and within Gear are two loadout choices that affect health.

• Stim Pack: This will let players heal themselves more often and more quickly
• Body Armor: the reduces damage from incoming bullets, but only briefly until the armor is broken by the damage it absorbs.

Additionally, one of the new Specialists – Crash – serves as a medic. When his ability is ready to use, he can restore and give bonus health to players for a limited time. He can also distribute Assault Packs which resupply his team magazines that will grant a higher score when they get kills, which means they can potentially get to Scorestreaks faster.

SITUATIONAL AWARENESS

Further tweaking the player experience in Black Ops 4 is the addition of fog of war. Players will now only see their immediate surrounding on the mini-map, or the those of their fellow players. Enemies will reveal their positions when firing a weapon that is not suppressed, and of course your favorite Black Ops Scorestreaks still exist and will perform as you would expect.

But the fog of war will create tactical opportunities for you and your teammates to communicate and work together in order to win. For example, you or another member of your squad could opt for some Gear to gain additional visibility:

• Acoustic Sensor: This piece of equipment combines the best of the past perks of Awareness (makes enemy movements easier to hear) and Sixth Sense (displays general direction of enemies on mini-map) perks into one powerful package.

Or you could opt to bring in Recon as your Specialist. Recon has Special Issue Equipment known as the Sensor Dart. This dart clears out a large radius within the fog of war for you and your teammates, allowing you to locate enemies. But be aware that these darts can be destroyed by fire from both friend and foes. Recon also has Vision Pulse, but this time your entire team will benefit from its effects which allow you to see through walls and will highlight players.

MOVEMENT

We’ll try to keep this as short and sweet as Treyarch Studio Design Director David Vonderhaar did on stage, highlighting three key movement points that are key in Black Ops 4.

• No thrust jumping
• No wall running
• 100% boots on the ground

Black Ops 4 is built to be fluid without slowing the player down. With that in mind, you can still keep your guns up while doing many other things in the game, like throwing grenades, using equipment, activating Scorestreaks, and mantling.

FLOW OF COMBAT
Weapons, health, situational awareness, movement and the Specialists themselves all come together in the flow of combat in Call of Duty: Black Ops 4. For instance, Seraph is back and is equipped with Tac Deploy. This is a team-wide spawn beacon that allows you to spawn in a new area for a period of time, creating game-changing moments.

One of the new Specialists is Torque, who is a master of disrupting flow and controlling lanes. He can lay down Razor Wire or create deployable and improvised cover with his Barricade. Or consider Firebreak, who returns with Reactor Core in tow. This piece of Special Issue Equipment creates an area-denial effect and he can even chew into his own health to extend its length, making it perfect for objective gameplay.

We’ve only just begun to scratch the surface of Call of Duty: Black Ops 4, so stay tuned for more as we count down to launch on October 12!

For more intel about Call of Duty: Black Ops 4, be sure to visit CallofDuty.com/blackops4 and follow @CallofDuty and @Treyarch on Twitter.