Mod Support Returns to ‘Call of Duty’ on PC Version of ‘Black Ops III’

Treyarch Studios has announced in a community post on their official website that it will be incorporating modding and mapping tools for Call of Duty: Black Ops III some time after the game’s launch on November 6th.

Though Black Ops III will drop this Friday, players will be obliged to wait until 2016 for access to such resources, as Treyarch has cited a closed alpha target date of “March 2016,” with no speculation yet on when the updates will be made available for beta testing, let alone general consumption.

What can we expect from Treyarch as far as modding goes? From their community blog:

You will be able to create Maps & Game Modes and more! … We will include Unranked Dedicated Server Files with the tools so you can run servers with modded content anywhere you choose. … We will provide an Unranked Server Browser so you can easily find and join servers with modded content.

Video game developers incorporating modding tools for the PC versions of their products isn’t in itself particularly novel. Mods have existed in some form or other since the earliest days of PC gaming, and it has become increasingly common for developers to provide resources to make the task easier for those among us who are less proficient in code to alter games. What makes this announcement worth noting is that it marks a return to mod support for the Call of Duty franchise after several years of considering player mods a matter of low priority, despite the insistence of long term fans.

“And yes, this is for real,” Treyarch Director of Development Caesar Stastny assured the franchise’s fanbase. Treyarch’s announcement came with the obligatory waiver:

Please remember that this is software development, so things don’t always work out exactly as planned. Sometimes features slip or drop off altogether, sometimes they get replaced with other, more awesome features as we hit into limitations of our original plans.

However loose our expectations at this point, this is a welcome return to mod support for Call of Duty and an encouraging indicator that the Black Ops III development team is taking feedback from its fans seriously. We look forward to hearing more from Treyarch on the subject.

Nate Church is @Get2Church on Twitter, and he can’t become a wildly overhyped internet celebrity without your help. Follow, then retweet and favorite everything he says. It’s the Right Thing To Do™!