Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 had been released all the way back in October 2018. However, its competitive mode, league play is yet to release. With how entertaining and popular the game is, this is more of a disappointment for the fans especially with how it was supposed to be out by December of last year.
Treyarch finally announced the release of their new League Play competitive mode which is supposed to be out starting the middle of February. However, this League Play mode will only be for the PS4. The rest of the gamers on other consoles and platforms would have to wait longer. People speculate that one of the primary reasons behind this is their contract of exclusivity with Sony. The blog post states:
“Given these changes to the League Play structure, we’re taking a few extra weeks to implement and test the new changes, and the launch of the World League Hub and League Play is now slated for our next major game update planned for mid-February, first on PS4. Because this is a part of a larger game update with a lot of moving pieces between developer, publisher, and first-party platforms, the specific day of the release is still being finalized with all parties in the release process and will be announced as we get closer to it.”
Apparently, the major problem with simply announcing competitive league play is all the middlemen and the segregation of platforms. This would seem to suggest that the league play would be a competitive mode between all the platforms together, with gamers competing against each other regardless of Operating System, Platform, or Console. However, that is all merely conjecture as Treyarch hasn’t revealed plans for the same as of yet.
Fans of the franchise, on the other hand, have not taken kindly to this move and are extremely unhappy with the decision. Most fans are getting tired of the period of exclusivity which the PlayStation 4 is receiving and think that is quite unfair to the players on the PC or the Xbox. In contrast, a few other players, primarily from the PS4 platform, are defending the company’s decision by stating that the company used to have a contract of exclusivity with Xbox wherein gamers on other platforms had to wait for months, and not weeks.
The fans of the franchise anticipate that the league play for all would be released anywhere between one to two weeks after Treyarch releases the PS4 exclusive league play. However, the truthfulness to that anticipatory conclusion remains yet unclear as Treyarch has merely stated that gamers would be notified shortly before these modes come over to the other platforms. They state that they wish to iron out the bugs and make the game smoother for a league play of this scale.
However unfair it may seem, this decision is final as gamers continue to wait for the competitive mode which was to be released late last year. Treyarch promises to notify gamers about the date of release. But the question isn’t whether the mode will be made available to the rest or not. But rather when.
