Treyarch is working to implement a day and night cycle into Call of Duty: Black Ops 4’s Blackout battle royale. In a recent interview, Black Ops 4’s game design director, David Vonderhaar said that the introduction of a cycle to the mode is “very possible.”
Day/Night cycles aren’t something that battle royale games have tended to utilise all that successfully. PUBG is almost entirely set in the middle of the afternoon (unless you count those now-removed fog maps, which I presume were set in the early morning). Fortnite does take place at different times of day, but the ‘night-time’ games are defined more by twilight than actual darkness. Introducing actual periods of night and day to a battle royale would force some interesting new strategies.
In an interview with Eurogamer, Vonderhaar said that a day/night cycle “is very possible, but we want to be sure that when we unlock that capability in the Blackout map, that we do it in a way that’s not impacting the performance of the existing time of day.”
That would suggest that Treyarch is happy with the feature’s impact on gameplay, but don’t want to sacrifice performance. That said, Vonderhaar goes on to say that “we have that capability, and it’s when and how do we deploy that capability.”
The suggestion is that we’ll see the cycle introduced some time in the future (assuming it works). With that in mind, don’t expect to see the feature when the Black Ops 4 release date arrives tomorrow – the likelihood is that, should the performance hold up, that a time of day system will be added to the game in a future update.