Hindsight to Foresight

Open betas are a tricky thing. They're essentially like giving players a demo of your game before it's finished. But they provide developers with very valuable information about the flow of the multiplayer experience before launch.

Whaddaya know? Activision and Treyarch have taken that into account and made some tweaks that are sure to make the game more intuitive, fair, and most importantly fun. Here are the four most important types of changes coming to Black Ops 4's Blackout mode.

Menus

The developers have already detailed how they plan to streamline the HUD in Blackout. Starting with being able to see the armor level of your teammates when playing quads so you can strategize and plan when it's time to grab some fresh loot.

And speaking of looting, the dev team are also currently workshopping a setting that allows you to instantly pick up items. Which would be a drastic change from the beta's relatively long pickup times. Also the quick equip menu will immediately close if you start firing your weapon; which will allow for quicker reaction times if you find yourself in a firefight.

Armor

If you are active in the CoD community then we're sure you've already heard that level 3 armor was extremely OP in the beta. Even when they toned it down by 75%.

The good news is that Treyarch have already announced that they'll be reworking the armor system so level 3 armor will degrade faster and become a very rare drop.

Matchmaking

Another thing they have finalized in this game is the process of inviting friends. It will work the same way that it always does in CoD games from here on out.

But there's one thing that's they're adding that's got us very excited. Treyarch are increasing the player count to 100; officially matching the player count of Fortnite and PUBG. Blackout is officially has a dog in the fight for Battle Royale supremacy.

Glitch & QoL Fixes

Some players were reporting various audio bugs that made footsteps abnormally quiet or loud as well as other audible oddities. Rest assured that the final edition of the game will have the final audio master so all of those problems will be fixed at launch, and there will be preset audio options for further tweaking and personalization.

If you were one of the people on Xbox One who had a problem with losing controller input after hitting the Xbox button, that problem is also fixed and rightly so.

Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 launches October 12th, 2018. Until then, we'll be holed up in our rooms looking at the Blackout map and relentlessly picking the best places to drop. Please send donuts.