For all of the technical leaps and bounds that Treyarch is making with Call of Duty: Black Ops III – the co-op campaign, the Specialist multiplayer component – one consequence of this forward thinking has resulted in the studio cutting the single-player campaign from the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 versions of the upcoming shooter, a decision that can be attributed to the memory limitations on both last-gen consoles.
Speaking to Official Xbox Magazine (via GamesRadar), the game’s Campaign Director Jason Blundell levelled on why the story mode was ultimately cut from the experience, which was born out of the ageing architecture of both systems. As an example, Blundell began by citing the ways in which the limited memory has an adverse effect on Black Ops III‘s customization options.
“Let’s just take a simple system, a really simple one–the weapon that you have,” Blundell said in the latest issue of Official Xbox Magazine (via GamesRadar). “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.”
To compensate for the absence, Call of Duty: Black Ops III will bundle in a digital version of the original Black Ops on PS3 and Xbox 360, and will retail for $10 less than its fully-fledged counterpart. It all comes down the ambitious scope of the 1-4 player co-op campaign, which will be placed front and center across the other versions of the shooter.
“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,” Blundell said. “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.”
While PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 version won’t include the single-player component, Call of Duty: Black Ops III will launch across all platforms later this week on Friday, November 6.