Black Ops 4 Barebones playlist will feature “no Specialists and classic gameplay”

A brand new Multiplayer playlist has been announced for Call of Duty: Black Ops 4, which will come as part of the Operation Grand Heist content event.

Called Barebones, the new playlist will have two significant aspects that will make it unique to any other playlist we’ve seen so far in Black Ops 4.

The first, and perhaps the most important, is that Specialists will be disabled in this mode, which means players will not be able to use the powerful abilities or equipment of the Specialists they choose to play as.

The second, which is far more ambiguous, is that the playlist will feature “classic gameplay rules,” although what these rules will be has yet to be announced. 

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If this means a reversion of some gameplay aspects back to their classical roots, we could see things like scorestreaks get changed back to killstreaks, or score limits of certain game modes be lowered. 

There are currently 12 Specialists in Black Ops 4 – the 10 shown above plus Zero and Outrider.

This new Backbones playlist was officially announced by Treyarch on February 27, as part of the latest episode of their Developer Update.

As for when the playlist will go live, those details have not been revealed yet, although it’s expected to release at some point during the currently ongoing Operation Grand Heist, which is expected to last for a couple of months. 

What is clear is that this playlist was created in response to overwhelming feedback from the community, as many players have begged Treyarch to add a Multiplayer mode with no Specialists. 

This comes as no surprise, since Specialists have been long considered to be controversial additions to the Black Ops subseries, especially because players don’t really need to perform well in-game to be able to use the unique abilities and equipment.