Blackout Player Count Tweaked In Latest Black Ops 4 Patch

Ever since Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 launched last week, Activision and Treyarch have been supporting the game with a series of rapid-fire updates. Generally, these updates are pretty small, making some slight tweaks to each of the game's modes – Blackout battle royale, standard multiplayer, and Zombies. The most recent update was no different in that regard, but the tweaks it made to Blackout could have some big implications for the mode.

The only changes that were applied to Blackout in this latest patch concern players counts in battle royale's various playlists. The player count for Duos has been bumped all the way up to 100, previously being capped at 88. That means there's now room for an additional six pairs of players in each match, potentially making games all the more hectic.

Similarly, the Squads playlist has seen its player cap change as well, but here we're actually seeing it go down. Though Squads was previously capped at 100 players, moving forward that cap will be 88 players. This, in turns, means three fewer squads in each match, assuming of course that the lobby is filled to capacity before the match begins (something that doesn't always happen).

In a post to Reddit, Treyarch says that it's "continuing to update various game settings to ensure the best experience for all players across all platforms and modes," so it sounds like the company isn't done tweaking player counts for Blackout's various playlists. On top of the changes arriving for Blackout, Treyarch has also made some tweaks to a couple of multiplayer modes and fixed a UI error in Zombies.

So, when we said it was a relatively small patch, we weren't kidding, but the good news is that there are also some stability improvements being applied to the PC version with this update as well. Treyarch says that an even bigger patch is arriving later this week, so we'll be keeping an eye out for news on that one. Stay tuned.