Last night Treyarch revealed their next entry in the Call Of Duty Black Ops series. The fourth instalment has been surrounded by rumours of a battle royale mode and lack of single-player campaign for quite some time. While we’re refrained from speculating until official word came in we can now confirm that those rumours were indeed true. The entire 50-ish minute livestream is embedded above if you’re inclined to watch the whole thing but if not we’ll summarise the important bits for your below.

First, the multiplayer: there’ll be no thrust-jumping or wall-running. So fans of bounding around like a rabbit with a firework up their arse will be a little disappointed. BlOps4 will also mark the return of the multiplayer Specialists, characters that have their own unique equipment. Each specialist will also have a solo mission, presumably to act as a kind of tutorial or introduction to their abilities and gear. Weapons will also be more customisable, during the stream a large amount of colours and attachments were shown for various weapons, though it wasn’t explained how you’ll acquire them.

Perhaps the two biggest shake-ups to multiplayer are the removal of automatic healing and recoil changes. Healing will no longer occur automatically after a short period of time but must instead be manually initiated by the player pressing a key. The devs said this was to introduce another layer of strategy and pacing to the game. The second major change is recoil; predictive recoil will be a first for the series. What this means is that you’ll be able to learn the recoil pattern of weapons (much like hardcore Counter Strike players can) and make adjustments while firing to land the next shot where you want it. Additionally, the minimap will now feature fog of war, with only a small area around the player revealed and a special sensor that can be deployed to reveal areas.

Moving on to Zombies mode: there’ll be a whole new set of zombies campaigns, the developers said three but only showed two in the livestream. The first shown was characters in a Roman setting as some kind of ritual was performed to create zombies and other horrors in an amphitheatre and had melee combat (albeit being all CGI so take it with a grain of salt) while the second took place on the RMS Titanic and showed the same relic from the Roman setting being used to create zombies on the ill-fated cruise ship. Frankly, we kinda liked the aesthetic on display during this segment of the show. It was also revealed that bots will now be an option for players who would prefer to play that way.

Lastly, we’ve got the new battle royale mode, Blackout. Treyarch said the new map will be large (“1500 times bigger than Nuketown”) and feature land, sea, and air vehicles. Additionally returning character models were shown and boasted about, presumably to show off the amount of customisation options available to players in this mode. Activision/Treyarch however did not say how many players this mode would support.

Call Of Duty Black Ops 4 will be releasing on 12 October 2018 and will, for the first time, be made available through the Blizzard store and app.