We’re just about two years in to the current console cycle, which is also right about when you would expect to see the parring back on last gen options. There was no Assassin’s Creed this year for PS3 or 360 (though last year they did offer Rogue), Mortal Kombat X was cancelled months after it failed to launch on the older systems, and Battlefront isn’t even bothering with the last cycle at all.
Given this, it wasn’t really a shocker when the Call of Duty franchise announced that there would be no campaign offered for last-gen versions of Black Ops 3. Not a shocker, but still a hefty disappointment for fans who haven’t had the chance to upgrade yet. That said, when seen in the light of the ambition that Treyarch is attempting with the newest Black Ops entry, it becomes a matter of not punishing fans with a severely watered down experience.
"Let’s just take a simple system, a really simple one – the weapon that you have," explains Jason Blundell, the game’s campaign director. "So it’s a co-op game. let’s imagine I have my customized weapon and I’ve made it with a stock and all this extended mag and so forth. For you as a co-op player to see what weapon I have, you have to have loaded in the memory – in resident memory – every single weapon customization. Current-gen memory just can’t do that. You’d have to have everything loaded otherwise you just can’t see what I’m carrying. You know you could simplify things down, but I think [Activision] made the right choice because I would hate for people to get an experience that wasn’t true to the vision of it. As the director I’m incredibly passionate about the experience being a pure experience, that you get what I was trying to have you get.”
If this is a deal breaker for you, we’re about to see the market flood with a lot of new system options as we move into the full launch season and the holidays descend. Plus, there’s always this fancy pants COD edition 1T PS4.
