Admittedly, this isn't top priority when it comes to ensuring my blog doesn't die again; I still have a review of Infinity War to write, one that I started again because my first draft was going nowhere, and I still have to talk about the Count Dankula situation, which is certainly more pressing an issue than Infinity War or this, but nothing rekindles a fire like strong emotions, and I watched the reveal event for Call of Duty: Black Ops IIII live, which brought up some strong emotions, so let's rant about Call of Duty like it actually matters.
First, some context, since I don't talk about Call of Duty that much, unless a really unimpressive entry has a trailer that gets my hopes up, or the series somehow becomes embroiled in identity politics and political correctness, which has happened in multiple of the series' recent instalments, most notably with WWII and its ideological distortion of history. But like all lads in his early twenties, I was once in love with this series; for me it started with Black Ops when I got the game in 2011 just after getting my Xbox 360 and couldn't put it down, I played Multiplayer and Zombies in that game pretty much constantly in my free time, and have played the Campaign more times than I can count, Black Ops is and has always been my most nostalgic experience with the series, and I still adore it. Then came Black Ops II, which had better multiplayer and campaign; and though I played less of it than its predecessor, Mob of the Dead still took up way too much of my time back in the day. My love for the series has faded over time however, as with a few exceptions like Titanfall and Titanfall 2, I've leaned very heavily back into single player games, which might be an indication of why this Black Ops IIII reveal pissed me off, but we'll get there. I, unlike most Call of Duty players, don't mind advanced movement; but then again, I like Titanfall, so that's not a massive surprise. Even with that in mind however, the seismic reaction in the game's audience upon the reveal of Infinite Warfare was understandable, as the novelty of advanced movement had worn off, and to many, Call of Duty was becoming something they didn't recognise, a feeling I know all too well. To many, including myself initially, WWII looked like a step in the right direction, but it wasn't. The game proved to be a very pretty, but very unremarkable game for me when it released, the campaign did little to grab me, despite my prior gushing about its potential, the Zombies was creepy, but not even comparable to Black Ops or Black Ops III's offerings, and the multiplayer was uninspired, and riddled by the cancer of predatory monetisation in the form of loot boxes. That coupled with the game's pathetic attempt to be politically correct despite its own claims to be faithful to the historical significance and horrors of the war, a point I just couldn't get over, and that was at the forefront of my mind every time I played the game, yeah, it really bothered me that much. I've always found it funny however how full of shit the reasoning for that intentional omission of reality was; how a rotting, roaring, reanimated corpse or people shooting and blowing each other up are completely fine, totally safe and inoffensive, because kids aren't impressionable to violence, but a swastika is unsafe and dangerous, because some spineless snowflake might see it and be upset, or, heaven forbid, a young, apparently very impressionable child sees it and decides to start Sieg Heiling for the Fuhrer. It would be funny if it wasn't so sad that a game that once shocked the world by making you play as a terrorist in 'No Russian' is now scared of showing a colourful cross, what happened to those testicles, where did they go.
If you couldn't tell, this point really irked me, and my respect for the franchise took a significant hit as a result, though WWII wasn't even the first game in the series do this kind of historical sanitising. And needless to say at this point, I wasn't the biggest fan of WWII, and my opinion regarding the series as it currently stands is not a particularly high one. Though something that I've given the series the benefit of the doubt on till now is trend chasing. Call of Duty was the trend setter for a time, with many games trying to copy its success, and with even its main competitors, like Medal Of Honor, Halo and Battlefield borrowing ideas and mechanics, with Medal Of Honor jumping for the Middle East setting popularised by Modern Warfare, and Halo 4 featuring a create a class system and killstreaks. And yet, despite the devs on that stage saying that Black Ops IIII is the most ambitious game they've ever made, it instead looks very much like all that industry leading innovation is dead in the Call of Duty series. Things got interesting with Infinite Warfare, a game that a lot of people recoiled at because of its far future sci fi setting, but I like sci fi, so I actually liked the look of it, and ended up enjoying its single player, though its Multiplayer and Zombies not so much. The series bounced back for a lot of people with WWII, having removed all the wall running and jump packs, it was, as they now incessantly roar, boots on the ground. The problem with WWII, as I've previously ranted on, was, in my opinion, that the game was painfully average, less enjoyable than World at War in all departments, and while it was very pretty, its sanitisation and distorting of history is a point I hated and don't want to rant about again. And unlike World at War, it jumped on the trend of aggressive monetisation, with a predatory micro-transaction system not that different to the ones in Halo 5 or Battlefront II, and that they had the gall to add to a remaster of a nine-year-old game that never had it in the first place. And despite the apparent coincidence that WWII came out just a year after the hugely successful Battlefield 1, and also a year after the much-disliked Infinite Warfare, I was willing to believe that Call of Duty weren't copying the competition, purely because of the apparent three year dev cycle that the Call of Duty games have, now though, I'm willing to bet that it wasn't a coincidence, because guess what Black Ops IIII gone and did.
Well first, how about the elephant in the room, or rather, that isn't in the room. Black Ops IIII will not have a single player campaign, and that is unacceptable. Something that made my blood boil about the live show was the way they addressed this, "Black Ops IIII doesn't have a traditional campaign, we're weaving narrative into each of the modes," is what is said 48 minutes in, go look, the whole show's on YouTube, and the smell of shit coming off of that statement is incredible. So, weaving it into each of the modes, that means nothing; Zombies will still have the weird, cryptic story line that it's always had, Blackout will have no story at all, and other multiplayer games like Destiny, Destiny 2 and Titanfall that tried to "weave narrative" into their multiplayer failed miserably to pull off anything even close to a compelling narrative, so why will this be any different, especially given that Destiny comes from the same publisher as Black Ops IIII. And it is downright awful how much they ride on Black Ops, II and III's single player content throughout the teasing and the show itself, showing footage from all three campaigns, only to then say there isn't one in Black Ops IIII, with the added sting of saying it like they were nervous to do so; mentioning it once at the very end of the show, with the additional added sting of immediately attempting to downplay it, by sandwiching it between saying "it's all about having fun with your friends" and "we've added unique/new (can't really make that out) ways to play solo and multiplayer." Something very noteworthy about those last two points is that the latter one contradicts the former; with them admitting to removing single player content, and then, in the same sentence, saying that they're adding unique/new ways to play
solo and multiplayer, it's a lie, it's bullshit. And you may say that no one plays campaign, and that it's all about the multiplayer these days, but that is simply not the case; Sony has been pumping out exclusive after exclusive that prove that a demand for single player games is alive and well, most recently with God Of War, which sold three million copies in three days despite not having multiplayer. Campaign has and always will have appeal; stories, characters, worlds, adventures that are exciting, scary, emotional, memorable, will always have an intrinsic value, it's why people love games like Halo, The Last Of Us, Uncharted, Bioshock, Metro, Spec Ops, Batman: Arkham, the list could go on and on, and even include previous Call of Duty titles like Modern Warfare, Black Ops and Black Ops II.
But that doesn't mean shit, right, as God of War, Spec Ops and Halo are not Call of Duty, and we're talking about the Campaign for that game, but even then, the 'no one plays it' argument just doesn't reflect reality. The numbers I caught wind of on PSNprofiles.com paint a different picture, but before I list them off, I will first state that these numbers may not be accurate, as it only consists of PlayStation trophies, excluding Xbox and PC data, making them not a full representation of the Call of Duty player base, but it's a start in proving the argument wrong. According to PSNprofiles.com, the number of gamers who completed WWII's campaign is 24.7%, that's a sizable number of Call of Duty players on PS4, given that 'no one plays it.' But what about Infinite Warfare, well, percentage of gamers who completed the final mission in the campaign, Operation Blood Storm, is 16%, a drop compared to WWII, but still a notable number of gamers on PS4 that played the campaign to its end, and Black Ops III, again, we're looking at a 10.1%. These numbers aren't mind blowing by any stretch, but they do show that the portion of players who play Campaign is not insignificant, in fact, if you haven't noticed, the percentage has been rising, from 10.1% to 16% and then to 24.7%. These numbers do not paint a full picture, without Xbox and PC achievements, there is missing data, but what is here proves the invalidity of the claim that no one plays campaign. And what's even juicer, people who say that "no one plays campaign" are sending the wrong the message to the publisher; who see it as a justification to give the community what they apparently want, because as the droolers keep saying, no one plays it, which is perfect for them, for a reason I'll get to. This own-goaling is similar to the likes of Anita Sarkeesian and Zoe Quinn saying back in the days of Gamergate that they want more women in gaming, while also saying that it's a horrible place for women as it's full of misogynists, I hope this comparison makes sense, but in trying to pedal their narrative and apparently bring more women into the industry, they were having the opposite effect, scaring women away because it's apparently full of misogynists, their lies and untruths were completely counterintuitive to their supposed goals, and they hurt themselves in the process. But back to Black Ops IIII, all the vomit they said about it all being about having fun with friends, this coming from the same devs who made it a big deal that their last game had a campaign that could be played cooperatively online or in split screen, so yeah, that ain't true, a rumour doing the rounds right now is that there was a campaign that got scrapped because of deadlines, which I could believe to some degree, given that Treyarch answers to its masters at Activision before anyone else, which would explain the prioritization of Blackout's development, assuming Treyarch aren't as corporate as Activision. There is a reason that Black Ops IIII has no campaign, be it that it never existed, or that it was quietly killed by Treyarch, and it's far more cynical than Treyarch's apparent community focus would suggest, but first, we need more context.
I hate Fortnite, and not because it's a bad game, because while the Battle Royale genre just doesn't appeal to me personally, I can at least understand that the game is easily accessible, free to play and visually appealing, all good qualities, I'm just not a fan of it personally. I hate Fortnite because of the ecosystem it has spawned around it. Like a few games in recent memory, mainly Minecraft and Five Nights at Freddy's, two games I actually liked, Fortnite has become almost cosmically successful, creating a massive fanbase, waves upon waves of Battle Royale ripoffs, which is funny given that Fortnite is, itself, a ripoff, a massive community of Youtubers and streamers, and, most obnoxiously, an army of obsessed children. This happened with Minecraft and FNaF too, which both expanded out into multimedia franchises with toy lines and books and spinoffs, spawned an armada of cheap ripoffs, and spawned and boosted online personalities like Game Theory in the case of FNaF and CaptainSparklez and SkydoesMinecraft in the case of Minecraft, today it's Ninja and Fortnite, and tomorrow, who knows. But what Fortnite has also done is perfect mobile game monetisation on PC and consoles, being free to play, and having a massive audience of children who dab and floss because it's lit, and more importantly, buy the battle passes and the VBucks. Another thing that's very noteworthy about Fortnite, and that makes me think Treyarch are full of shit, is how fast Battle Royale games are made. PUBG made the genre popular, but Fortnite was never intended to be a Battle Royale game, initially being intended to be what is now the Save The World mode. Then PUBG went huge and Epic Games stitched together a Battle Royale mode of their own in a few months in response. Another example is Boss Key Productions, the now bust video game company behind the mega-flop that was LawBreakers, who, shortly before going bust, pumped out Radical Heights, a shameless cash-in Battle Royale that they probably hoped would save their company by eating into the success of Fortnite, which it clearly didn't. The point to take from Fortnite and Radical Heights is that Battle Royale's are not hard to make, that a dev team with the resources and the talent can put one together in a matter of months, and if Treyarch has anything in abundance, it's resources and talent.
More on that resources, because now we're actually going to talk about Blackout mode, Black Ops IIII's Battle Royale, which is apparently going to be really cool, even though they didn't show any footage of it in their reveal. Blackout mode, in concept, doesn't sound terrible, granted it's clearly copying Fortnite and PUBG, while putting a supposedly Call of Duty spin on it by copying Battlefield with the massive map and land, air and sea vehicles, but it at least sounds like a neat idea, more so in that it's effectively going to be all fan service, featuring classic maps, characters and weapons from across the Black Ops series. It is kind of funny how they're giving people Black Ops' classic characters when black Ops IIII will add nothing to the series in that department, but while other people hear fan service, I hear something else, something a bit more corporate. Obviously, Blackout is an attempt to bank on the current Battle Royale craze, but as previously mentioned, Battle Royale games are not hard or time consuming to make, with Fortnite and Radical Heights being developed and published in just a few months. Also consider that this so-called celebration of all things Black Ops will be recycling assets; using classic maps that they've already developed, weapons, character models, this is all stuff Treyarch has access to already; the only thing they need to do is stitch it all together and add vehicles, the adding vehicles part probably being the hardest thing they need to do. The advantage of this should be clear; a short development time, recycling assets instead of developing new ones, cutting corners in how much work they have to do, it's all for cutting costs, it's cheap. Now compare that to how much time and money it takes to put together a campaign, you need writers, story boarders, composers, directors, motion capture and actors, with that last one being of particular importance, given the series' history of getting massive TV and Hollywood stars like Kevin Spacey, Kit Harrington, Christopher Meloni, Gary Oldman, Josh Duhamel and Sam Worthington, not to mention all the Zombies cameos. That in addition to the time needed to create the story, writing, recording and mo-caping for the characters, and putting together missions that are cinematic and provide a diverse range of visuals and gameplay. The simple truth is that Campaigns take time, and time is money, which makes the cheap and easy to develop Battle Royale mode a win for the studio, especially given how massively profitable Battle Royale is, and that with the Campaign gone, they're effectively purged all of the game's non-monetisable elements, which will no doubt be hugely profitable for them, and downright predatory to the consumer, who will buy it like they buy loot boxes in WWII and BattleFront II, and Battle Passes in Fortnite.
And now for the Multiplayer, though the issue I have here extends to the entire game in a big way, and that's identity. Call of Duty's campaign is known for its over the top action and spectacle, its famous for its crazy action sequences that wouldn't seem out of place in a Michael Bay film, and in losing that, that ridiculous and bombastic campaign, Call of Duty has lost part of its image, a core pillar of its identity. But let's pretend for a second that all the 'no one plays campaign' droolers are right, which they're not, and that multiplayer is all that matters, has Call of Duty's identity, the essence of the series, been compromised, well, yeah. Zombies could go down the shitter pretty fast, but that's purely my opinion because a melee only Zombies map, assuming it is melee only, doesn't sound like a good idea to me personally, and Zombies' history of establishing new heroes that aren't one off cameos isn't good *cough* Black Ops II *cough*. But where the damage could really be done is of course in multiplayer. They made an adorably big deal about how the game has no jet packs and wall running, using that tired, annoying and meaningless phrase 'boots on the ground' which was of course met with roaring applause by the droolers. And as an aside on that 'boots on the ground' and why I hate the phrase, it's simple, it was a phrase that was once used to describe Call of Duty minus advanced movement, with it literally being boots on the ground with no one flying or running on walls, but now it's effectively a dog whistle, a meaningless and overused statement that panders to apologists; people who think 'boots on the ground' means they're listening to the fans, and thus making all the shit they try to pull justifiable. For instance, Specialists, which are back by popular demand from Black Ops III, and, minus a few changes, are pretty much the same as Black Ops III's Specialists, only now there's a medic, and one of them has a grappling hook. The bullshit part there is that they haven't really changed anything that needed changing; reusing the Specialists when people don't really like them in the first place, and not changing their mechanics in any meaningful way besides removing advanced movement, it's lazy. But what they have changed, for the worse, is the apparent emphasis on team work in gameplay, adding a medic class, restricting Specialists to one class per team, dropping lobbies from 6v6 to 5v5, and even getting rid of kill counters from what I hear. The issue here is of course that Call of Duty isn't a team game; it's a game that's always been the most rewarding to the most skilled players, and a game that, aside from the custom classes and equipment, puts people on a balanced playing field. That balanced playing field is disrupted by Specialists, who are given to everyone, regardless of skill, a system that works in Titanfall, where Titans are a core part of the gameplay loop, but not in Call of Duty, because it rewards noobs and people who are good at the game equally, thus failing to disincentive mediocrity. This is a far cry from the Call of Duty's of old, where noobs would get their arses handed to them by Prestigers with sexy weapon skins, a formula that rewarded and incentivised skill, and in this respect, Call of Duty's identity has already been damaged long before this.
But in addition to giving everyone participation ribbons, Black Ops IIII's doubling down on Specialists and new emphasis on team play turns the game into a hero shooter, which is again not what Call of Duty is. Like Battle Royale, hero shooters aren't new, and they've certainly had their successes like Team Fortress 2 and Overwatch, games where all the different heroes have unique weapons and abilities, with strengths and weaknesses that compliment other heroes' abilities. These games are class based, unlike Call of Duty which has always been skill based, until you could whip out an insta-kill flamethrower and wreak shit with minimal effort. And this is the problem I have with another buzzword that gets thrown around by the apologists; innovation. People who hated advanced movement, of which I'm actually not of the opinion, recognised that it was a change to Call of Duty's formula, same with the Specialists, they just saw it as a change that made Call of Duty something that it isn't, since Advanced Warfare wasn't the first game to have advanced movement, and Black Ops III wasn't the first game to have classes, this was no longer Call of Duty leading the industry, it was Call of Duty copying other games, borrowing their mechanics and implementing them less effectively, while also losing what made it unique and special to begin with. And I wasn't always of this opinion, like I said earlier I was prepared to give WWII the benefit of the doubt when it came to copying Battlefield 1, but Call Of Duty's jettisoning of single player in favour of a cheap to make and highly profitable trendy game mode has destroyed that doubt. The old, tired gameplay formula of Call of Duty isn't being innovated, it's being mutated, it's gone from being the success to imitate to being the imitator, and these imitations are being passed off by the devs as ambition and innovation, when in reality, it's laziness and a complete lack of ambition, powered by the greed that fuels Activision and other publishers, and made excusable by the brand name that tops sales charts every year, despite only really being Call of Duty in name. And it's for that reason I think this is both how the franchise finally dies, and how it will persist for years to come. I know that doesn't make a lot of sense but let me explain; Call of Duty Black Ops IIII will still sell, regardless of the fact that it looks lazy, it's multiplayer and Blackout modes will be heavily monetised and make an absurd amount of profit for Activision, who, at the end of the day, care more about that green than anything else. They will see the success of chasing trends paying off like it never has before, and it will fuel the same aggressive, predatory micro-transactions that will inevitably infest Black Ops IIII like it did on WWII, keeping Call of Duty alive for years to come. But the Battle Royale craze will die, Fortnite, like Minecraft before it, will die, it may take years, it may take months, but death will come all the same, and when that happens, and people have forgotten about Battle Royale, where will that leave Blackout? will Call of Duty go back to the old, less profitable model of dumping millions of dollars into a mode that 'no one plays' or will it chase the next trend, then the next, and how long then before the respect that the brand has acquired is completely eroded away, and the game's sales tank, killing the series. Given the response to BattleFront II's micro-transaction system, it's also entirely possible that Call of Duty could face a gamer revolt, maybe not this year, but at some point, and a backlash like that would be disastrous for the series' reputation. Either way, Call of Duty's decline is well under way, and Black Ops IIII, the game that might have been able to slow that decline, has only accelerated this series' inevitable collapse.
I once thought that Call of Duty would die if it failed to innovate, but I was wrong on both fronts, it didn't die, nor did it innovate. Black Ops IIII was a game I was excited for, but this reveal has not only killed my excitement for the game, it's made me realise just how sick this series has become, abandoning innovative and meaningful additions in favour of assimilating ideas from other games and pretending that it's evolving, when in reality, it's killing itself. The removal of any meaningful single player content in favour of a cheap, trendy money machine shows just how little of Call of Duty's identity is left, and it's made the death of the once great franchise not a possibility, but a certainty. Call of Duty's end is coming, and while I was once hopeful that I'd one day not be disappointed by the series, that hope is now gone, Black Ops IIII looks awful, and this from the devs that made me love the series in the first place, I'm disappointed.
First, some context, since I don't talk about Call of Duty that much, unless a really unimpressive entry has a trailer that gets my hopes up, or the series somehow becomes embroiled in identity politics and political correctness, which has happened in multiple of the series' recent instalments, most notably with WWII and its ideological distortion of history. But like all lads in his early twenties, I was once in love with this series; for me it started with Black Ops when I got the game in 2011 just after getting my Xbox 360 and couldn't put it down, I played Multiplayer and Zombies in that game pretty much constantly in my free time, and have played the Campaign more times than I can count, Black Ops is and has always been my most nostalgic experience with the series, and I still adore it. Then came Black Ops II, which had better multiplayer and campaign; and though I played less of it than its predecessor, Mob of the Dead still took up way too much of my time back in the day. My love for the series has faded over time however, as with a few exceptions like Titanfall and Titanfall 2, I've leaned very heavily back into single player games, which might be an indication of why this Black Ops IIII reveal pissed me off, but we'll get there. I, unlike most Call of Duty players, don't mind advanced movement; but then again, I like Titanfall, so that's not a massive surprise. Even with that in mind however, the seismic reaction in the game's audience upon the reveal of Infinite Warfare was understandable, as the novelty of advanced movement had worn off, and to many, Call of Duty was becoming something they didn't recognise, a feeling I know all too well. To many, including myself initially, WWII looked like a step in the right direction, but it wasn't. The game proved to be a very pretty, but very unremarkable game for me when it released, the campaign did little to grab me, despite my prior gushing about its potential, the Zombies was creepy, but not even comparable to Black Ops or Black Ops III's offerings, and the multiplayer was uninspired, and riddled by the cancer of predatory monetisation in the form of loot boxes. That coupled with the game's pathetic attempt to be politically correct despite its own claims to be faithful to the historical significance and horrors of the war, a point I just couldn't get over, and that was at the forefront of my mind every time I played the game, yeah, it really bothered me that much. I've always found it funny however how full of shit the reasoning for that intentional omission of reality was; how a rotting, roaring, reanimated corpse or people shooting and blowing each other up are completely fine, totally safe and inoffensive, because kids aren't impressionable to violence, but a swastika is unsafe and dangerous, because some spineless snowflake might see it and be upset, or, heaven forbid, a young, apparently very impressionable child sees it and decides to start Sieg Heiling for the Fuhrer. It would be funny if it wasn't so sad that a game that once shocked the world by making you play as a terrorist in 'No Russian' is now scared of showing a colourful cross, what happened to those testicles, where did they go. 
If you couldn't tell, this point really irked me, and my respect for the franchise took a significant hit as a result, though WWII wasn't even the first game in the series do this kind of historical sanitising. And needless to say at this point, I wasn't the biggest fan of WWII, and my opinion regarding the series as it currently stands is not a particularly high one. Though something that I've given the series the benefit of the doubt on till now is trend chasing. Call of Duty was the trend setter for a time, with many games trying to copy its success, and with even its main competitors, like Medal Of Honor, Halo and Battlefield borrowing ideas and mechanics, with Medal Of Honor jumping for the Middle East setting popularised by Modern Warfare, and Halo 4 featuring a create a class system and killstreaks. And yet, despite the devs on that stage saying that Black Ops IIII is the most ambitious game they've ever made, it instead looks very much like all that industry leading innovation is dead in the Call of Duty series. Things got interesting with Infinite Warfare, a game that a lot of people recoiled at because of its far future sci fi setting, but I like sci fi, so I actually liked the look of it, and ended up enjoying its single player, though its Multiplayer and Zombies not so much. The series bounced back for a lot of people with WWII, having removed all the wall running and jump packs, it was, as they now incessantly roar, boots on the ground. The problem with WWII, as I've previously ranted on, was, in my opinion, that the game was painfully average, less enjoyable than World at War in all departments, and while it was very pretty, its sanitisation and distorting of history is a point I hated and don't want to rant about again. And unlike World at War, it jumped on the trend of aggressive monetisation, with a predatory micro-transaction system not that different to the ones in Halo 5 or Battlefront II, and that they had the gall to add to a remaster of a nine-year-old game that never had it in the first place. And despite the apparent coincidence that WWII came out just a year after the hugely successful Battlefield 1, and also a year after the much-disliked Infinite Warfare, I was willing to believe that Call of Duty weren't copying the competition, purely because of the apparent three year dev cycle that the Call of Duty games have, now though, I'm willing to bet that it wasn't a coincidence, because guess what Black Ops IIII gone and did. 
But that doesn't mean shit, right, as God of War, Spec Ops and Halo are not Call of Duty, and we're talking about the Campaign for that game, but even then, the 'no one plays it' argument just doesn't reflect reality. The numbers I caught wind of on PSNprofiles.com paint a different picture, but before I list them off, I will first state that these numbers may not be accurate, as it only consists of PlayStation trophies, excluding Xbox and PC data, making them not a full representation of the Call of Duty player base, but it's a start in proving the argument wrong. According to PSNprofiles.com, the number of gamers who completed WWII's campaign is 24.7%, that's a sizable number of Call of Duty players on PS4, given that 'no one plays it.' But what about Infinite Warfare, well, percentage of gamers who completed the final mission in the campaign, Operation Blood Storm, is 16%, a drop compared to WWII, but still a notable number of gamers on PS4 that played the campaign to its end, and Black Ops III, again, we're looking at a 10.1%. These numbers aren't mind blowing by any stretch, but they do show that the portion of players who play Campaign is not insignificant, in fact, if you haven't noticed, the percentage has been rising, from 10.1% to 16% and then to 24.7%. These numbers do not paint a full picture, without Xbox and PC achievements, there is missing data, but what is here proves the invalidity of the claim that no one plays campaign. And what's even juicer, people who say that "no one plays campaign" are sending the wrong the message to the publisher; who see it as a justification to give the community what they apparently want, because as the droolers keep saying, no one plays it, which is perfect for them, for a reason I'll get to. This own-goaling is similar to the likes of Anita Sarkeesian and Zoe Quinn saying back in the days of Gamergate that they want more women in gaming, while also saying that it's a horrible place for women as it's full of misogynists, I hope this comparison makes sense, but in trying to pedal their narrative and apparently bring more women into the industry, they were having the opposite effect, scaring women away because it's apparently full of misogynists, their lies and untruths were completely counterintuitive to their supposed goals, and they hurt themselves in the process. But back to Black Ops IIII, all the vomit they said about it all being about having fun with friends, this coming from the same devs who made it a big deal that their last game had a campaign that could be played cooperatively online or in split screen, so yeah, that ain't true, a rumour doing the rounds right now is that there was a campaign that got scrapped because of deadlines, which I could believe to some degree, given that Treyarch answers to its masters at Activision before anyone else, which would explain the prioritization of Blackout's development, assuming Treyarch aren't as corporate as Activision. There is a reason that Black Ops IIII has no campaign, be it that it never existed, or that it was quietly killed by Treyarch, and it's far more cynical than Treyarch's apparent community focus would suggest, but first, we need more context. 
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