Earlier this week, one of the Treyarch devs jumped on Reddit to clarify changes made to the revive timer on Call of Duty’s Blackout. During the beta, it only took three seconds to revive a fallen teammate. When Blackout launches on Friday, it’ll be bumped to five seconds.
For comparison, the two biggest Battle Royale games, Fortnite and PUBG, both take ten seconds. The folks at Treyarch also increased the crawl speed for downed players slightly too. Here’s the full comment via Reddit:
Negative. Blackout was 3 seconds revive in beta and we’ve increased it to 5 seconds for launch. We’ve also slightly increased downed crawl speed. With a faster crawl which allows you to reach cover quicker, we felt a slightly longer revive time was needed. An increased revive time also encourages the use of the Medic perk, which reduces revive time by 50% among other things. That said, we enjoy the gameplay around revive times at a quicker pace compared to the genre standard.
I like the bump. Revives shouldn’t be so quick that getting downed doesn’t mean anything. Three seconds was too short. Add in perks, and it was damn near instant. But ten seconds wouldn’t mesh well with Call of Duty’s faster gameplay. Ten seconds makes sense for PUBG and Fortnite with their gameplay hooks.
I’m not sure how I feel about a faster crawl speed. It already seemed pretty fast during the beta. At least, compared to other Battle Royale games.
And the revive bump also makes sense when it comes to perks. Those things were littered everywhere in the map, and Treyarch wants us to use them. Plus, they another layer of strategy to the genre we haven’t seen. Which perks should you stock up on? When should you use them? It’s a small, but meaningful addition to the core gameplay loop.
Bottom line, Blackout’s revive time should always be faster than the Battle Royale norm. Faster gameplay, faster time to kill, and more movement options make it a necessity. It’s hard to see how Treyarch could make revives take any longer without also making significant changes to other parts of Blackout’s gameplay.
I can’t wait to see how Blackout evolves in the weeks and months post-launch. Epic and Fortnite have shown the formula for wild success. Tons of dev support, but also fast. Call of Duty’s Blackout is launching with a good base. We’ll see if Treyarch can mold it into something special.