While the Call of Duty campaigns haven’t been elevated much since Modern Warfare 2, the campaigns are still one of the most interesting parts of a Call of Duty game. However, anyone that’s stuck with a 7th generation console won’t be able to play the campaign for Black Ops 3. While they haven’t gotten as much flack for this decision as 343 Industries got for cutting out split screen, there’s been some concern as to why Treyarch would do such a thing. In an interview with the Official Xbox Magazine, Treyarch’s campaign director Jason Blundell discusses why the campaign was cut out of the Xbox 360 and PS3 versions of Black Ops 3.
“Let’s just take a simple system, a really simple one – the weapon that you have,” explains Blundell. “So it’s a co-op game. let’s imagine I have my customized weapon and I’ve made it with a stock and all this extended mag and so forth. For you as a co-op player to see what weapon I have, you have to have loaded in the memory – in resident memory – every single weapon customization. Current-gen memory just can’t do that. You’d have to have everything loaded otherwise you just can’t see what I’m carrying. You know you could simplify things down, but I think [Activision] made the right choice, because I would hate for people to get an experience that wasn’t true to the vision of it. As the director I’m incredibly passionate about the experience being a pure experience, that you get what I was trying to have you get.”
He does show that he understands why Xbox 360 and PS3 owners might be angry over the lack of a campaign. However, he remains adamant on the decision. “The wonderful thing about consoles and the PC market today is, as a director, I know you’ll experience it the way I wanted to communicate it,” adds Blundell. “So when they’re starting to say, ‘This is not going to be there, this is not going to be there, you can’t do this…’ I think it was the right choice to say, ‘we shouldn’t do that’.”
Call of Duty: Black Ops 3 will be released on November 6th. The game goes for $60 for the PC, PS4, and Xbox One, and $50 for the Xbox 360 and PS3 versions.