Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 is a thoroughly modern take on the Call of Duty series

This article was originally published in PC Gamer issue 319. For more quality articles about all things PC gaming, you can subscribe now in the UK and the US. The rumours are true: the traditional Call of Duty singleplayer campaign is dead. There’s no lavish, indulgent six-hour collection of cinematic story missions in Black Ops 4. Now the story is threaded into multiplayer, the mode that, let’s be honest, is the real reason that fans of the series keep buying it year after year.

It’s a bold, and perhaps inevitable, move by developer Treyarch, but for the veteran Call of Duty studio it’s just another way of telling a story. “If you’ve been following the Black Ops series, you’ll know that we never tell a story the same way twice,” says co-studio head Dan Bunting. “In the first game, your companion throughout the campaign was a figment of your imagination. In the second game, we told a branching story. And in Black Ops 3 the whole