Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 drops Steam for Blizzard's Battle.net

Those among us that have complained about Call of Duty games being too similar from year to year got our wish during this week’s Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 reveal. Activision had a host of changes to announce, including dropping the single-player campaign and the addition of a Battle Royale mode. One of the changes Activision will change the way PC gamers will play the game when it releases this October.

In addition to a renewed focus on the PC release of the game, Activision is shifting the game from Valve’s Steam service to its own Battle.net service, the only platform that has primarily hosted Blizzard properties until the release of Destiny 2 last year. The shift to Battle.net will mean that Steam gamers who somehow haven’t had a Battle.net account up to this point will have to make one to play. The good news is that the move comes with all the benefits of other Battle.net games.

“Those of us at Blizzard have been friends with Treyarch for many, many years,” said Blizzard’s Jeff Kaplan. “When it came to working on Overwatch, we consulted Treyarch on a number of features. With all the features of Battle.net, I think it’s going to be pretty amazing what Black Ops 4 is going to have to offer.”

Additionally, developer Treyarch is touting a renewed focus on the PC this time around as it developers the port in cooperation with developer Beenox, which recently worked on the Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare remaster. The PC version will feature 4K resolution, an uncapped frame rate, and support for both HDR displays and ultra-wide monitors. Treyarch is promising an extensive loadout of sliders and switches to toggle graphical settings to fit their rig’s particular needs. The team is also tweaking things like weapon recoil and knockback to better suit the more precise mouse-and-keyboard controls most PC gamers are using to play the game.

And yes, Black Ops 4 will have dedicated servers for multiplayer.

The full suite of PC-focused features should please PC gamers, an audience that has often lagged behind console audiences and seen PC ports suffer as a result. It remains to be seen how gamers take the move off of Steam, but Activision is just the latest company to start moving its games off of Valve’s services and onto their own robust service.

We’ll find out if Activision, Treyarch, and Beenox can make good on these promises, but PC gamers have something to look forward to this fall.