Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 will use Blizzard Entertainment’s Battle.net online gaming service. The switch from Activision’s own service to Blizzard shows increasing cooperation between the Activision and Blizzard sister companies, which the parent Activision Blizzard owns.
The move by Treyarch, the Activision-owned studio developing this year’s Call of Duty game, reflects the growing importance of the PC as a gaming platform, said studio head Mark Lamia in a press briefing. Lamia said that development studio Beenox has a dedicated team “working to build the most robust and customizable PC experience that you have ever seen.”
The version of Black Ops 4 is being custom built for the PC.
“We’ve been working closely with both that dedicated team at Beenox, but also with Blizzard to make this a great experience for our PC fans,” Lamia said. “That’s a first for the franchise.”
This means that Black Ops 4 will be fully integrated with all the social features on Battle.net. You will be able to add friends, talk with your friends, see them playing other games, party up, and interact with them in-game.
You’ll be able to talk to players across Black Ops 4 into Overwatch.
“At Beenox we have a long history of PC development, and so the PC community is always in the back of our minds,” said Thomas Wilson, creative director at Beenox. “We’re talking about making sure that we deliver on what they want.”
Beenox is testing a wide array of PC hardware variants to make sure the largest number of players will be able to play the game. Beenox is tweaking gunplayer mechanics and redesigning the user interface.
In addition, the PC will have a variable frame rate, depending on what kind of monitor the player has. It will support for HDR and ultra-wide monitors. The game debuts on October 12 on the Xbox One, PlayStation 4, and the PC.