COD Black Ops 4: Blackout Beta – Everything We Know

The Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 Blackout beta kicks off today and here’s all the information you need about the game including the map and mechanics.

The Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 Blackout beta kicks off in just a few hours on PS4, with Xbox and PC players following later this week. We’ve already written about when you can expect to play it and how to gain access, but what do we know about what the beta will actually contain?

World Map

Last week, Treyarch revealed the map for Blackout. They’d previously only confirmed it’d be the size of about 1,500 Nuketowns, but now we know exactly what it looks like, along with the names of various locations. They also released a trailer last week that shows the map in action. Long-time fans of the Call of Duty franchise will recognize numerous places such as Nuketown, Raid, and Verruckt, the World at War zombies map based on Asylum. There are even zombies in the trailer, though how much of a threat they are hasn’t been revealed.

Gameplay

Going by everything we’ve seen so far, Blackout is going to be much faster paced than any other popular battle royale game. Boats, helicopters, off-road buggies, there’s a bunch of vehicles that can be used to get around the relatively small map. Not to mention the parachutes and wing gliders. Players have infinite sprint, can slide behind cover and there’s the option of a grappling hook – expect some intense action.

There’s also no automatic health regeneration. If you get wounded, you need to rely on a squadmate to heal you up. We’re not sure how that will work in the solo playlist. Expect some weapons from previous games too, along with fondly remembered characters from both single-player campaigns and zombies. Of course, Treyarch is developing so it’s highly unlikely we’ll see anything from the Modern Warfare series as that’s courtesy of Infinity Ward.

You can pick class specialists in Blackout, such as Ruin and Battery, but you need to unlock most of them first by finding their weapons in the world. For example, Battery utilizes the War Machine grenade launcher, but you can’t select her specialist at the start of a game until you find the War Machine somewhere on the map. Of course, we don’t know the locations yet, nor do we know if they’re the same every game or completely random.

Blackout is looking better every hour, and we can’t wait to get our teeth stuck into it today. Check out our guide on how to get a beta code and when it becomes available right here.