When Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 was released in October of last year, League Play, the competitive ranked game mode, was anticipated to be added to the game in December. When Operation Absolute Zero was announced, Treyarch’s blog post detailed reasons for the delay of League Play. According to the post, Treyarch was “spending little more time in development to give these features the polish that our competitive players expect and deserve.” Fast-forward to the latest blog post, Treyarch has stated that League Play is coming mid-February, but not for everyone right away.
In the post, Treyarch makes brief mention of the initial exclusivity of League Play, stating that it will release first on PS4, leaving PC and Xbox One players in the dust. “League Play is now slated for our next major game update planned for mid-February, first on PS4.” Treyarch says that because the competitive mode is part of a larger update, they still need to get all their ducks in a row before announcing a specific release date. An overall expansion of the League Play functionality is one reason for the delay. Black Ops 4 will launch the “fourth pillar” of the game, World League Hub, in the February update. This new menu will feature League Play, complete with a whole new ruleset, as well as CWL Custom Games, currently located in the Multiplayer menu.
Both Xbox One and PC players are understandably unhappy that League Play will be released on PS4 before the other systems, and have taken to Reddit to voice their displeasure. While the PS4 timed exclusive post-launch content is nothing new for the game, players on systems other than the PS4 have had to wait seven days for new content after it hit PlayStation according to an Activision blog post. Waiting a week to play new content is not the biggest deal for smaller updates and features, but for large, and highly anticipated features such as League Play, it can be frustrating, especially since players have already been waiting since December for the game mode.