This year’s COD is Black Ops 4 after all, as Activision confirm the game’s release date and announce a reveal event for May.
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The rumours are true: this year’s Call Of Duty is Black Ops 4 and Activision really don’t know how Roman numerals work.
The reveal has been curiously low key though and was originally done via website VentureBeat, which was one of the first to publish rumours of the game’s name.
A livestream event was briefly scheduled via Twitter but quickly cancelled, after which the six-minute video below was released on YouTube (spoiler: there’s no gameplay footage and it’s a complete waste of your time, unless you’ve got a thing for welding).
It all seems a bit rushed, but the bottom line is that all we really know is that the release date is October 12 (earlier than usual, probably to get out of the way of Red Dead Redemption II on October 26) and there’ll be a ‘community reveal event’ on May 17.
Activision has not confirmed anything about the setting yet, but multiple sources claim that it will be set in 2020 and not as far in the future as Black Ops 3.
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Perhaps the most interesting thing about the announcement is that it’s the latest piece of news to be successfully predicted by Twitter personality Marcus Sellars, following earlier rumours about Black Ops 4, today’s Nintendo Direct, and Diablo III on Switch (which hasn’t been confirmed yet, but has been corroborated by other sources, including Eurogamer).
He also predicted a Switch version of Black Ops 4, which hasn’t yet been announced. However, there’s a Nintendo Direct later tonight, which may not be a coincidence.
Sellars’ most significant rumour of recent days though is that PlayStation 5 development kits have already been sent out to third party studios, which suggests a 2019 or 2020 release date for Sony’s next console.
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