Activision updated its official Call of Duty site with some new details on the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 versions of Call of Duty: Black Ops III. Specifically, those versions of the game will be missing some features. Considering the age of those platforms, that shouldn't be surprising. But the specifics actually surprised me a bit.

Those old versions of the game won't contain the game's campaign.

Weird, right? To hear the official update tell it, the large, co-op nature of the Black Ops III campaign was too much for Beenox and Mercenary Technology to cram into an Xbox 360/PS3-sized hole. Additionally, the gun painting features and "the new suite of eSports tools" will also be limited to PS4, Xbox One, and PC.

This sort of thing happens as we turn from one generation to the next. At some point, enough players are playing on the new boxes to make it crazy to continue to hamstring your games by making sure they're roughly identical on the new machines. The whole thing reminds me of Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3 for the PS1, which was a significantly different game when compared to its PS2 counterpart. That's certainly not the only example, but you get my point.

The PS3/360 version of Black Ops III will still contain the zombies mode and the competitive multiplayer, and it'll sell for $49.99. That's a $10 discount over the "real" version of the game. Feel free to make jokes about the value of a Call of Duty campaign being ten bucks in the comments below. This version will also come with a digital version of the original Black Ops. All told, I guess that doesn't sound like a terrible value? I don't know, I'm less-than-sold on Treyarch's big co-op campaign ideas based on what I saw back at E3, so it's hard to judge this situation right now. I'm curious to see how all that comes together.

This generational transition has been a weird one, with publishers hedging their bets at first only to discover that, yes, people are actually buying the new machines. This is how Activision's dealing with it, but then you've got Warner cutting the Nemesis system from the last-gen versions of Shadow of Mordor and... well, you've got Warner again with Mortal Kombat X.

Remember when Mortal Kombat X was supposed to ship on the old consoles right alongside the new ones? It finally got officially canceled about a month ago. Here was their official update:

Please know our teams worked diligently to meet the quality standards set by the current-gen versions of the game. We were not able to get the PS3 and Xbox 360 versions to the quality expected of a Mortal Kombat game and are very sorry for not being able to deliver the products as originally planned.

Walmart must not have got the memo, because they're taking pre-orders right now for a "December 31" release, which usually translates into "at one point someone told us this version was going to exist but then they didn't give us a new release date so we're going to keep it here just in case but we don't know what's going on."

Actually, now that I dig into it a bit, some third-party seller on Amazon is claiming to be selling a "collectable" copy of MKX for 360 for the low, low price of $200,000. Somehow I doubt they've got a build of the game.

One has to wonder how long the other big third-party franchises will continue to appear on the old machines. I figure we'll get down to that "sports only" catalog over the next year. Maybe two? It'll be interesting to see what that means for Destiny players, what with its whole "ten year plan" and all that. Think next year's Destiny will still try to maintain parity across all platforms? I don't.

One last thing... you know, I figured it'd be hard to find anyone angry about this Call of Duty move and that most of the people playing on those old platforms don't necessarily care enough about video games to follow them too closely, but I didn't need to look far. Here are the four comments posted to Activision's official update about all this:

Yep.

The only version of THPS3 I played was its PS1 version, which I loved in the day. Never have played its PS2 version and only discovered that it even existed maybe 5 or so years ago.

Seems like they would do a bigger discount, but I understand why they didn't

Haha, the Call of Duty campaign is only worth ten bucks.

There, joke's done been done.

Has brad finally correctly predicted the end of Call of Duty? (I kid...)

most of the people playing on those old platforms don't necessarily care enough about video games to follow them too closely

Way to shit on every person who loves videogames but doesn't have a lot of money, Jeff.

I actually find it super impressive that so many games are still released for the PS3. When the Destiny vault expansion happened and they announced they'd have to cut the gear comparison feature I thought it was ridiculous, but when I found out that the PS3 has only 256MB RAM it kind of made sense (and really shows the tight limits they're working under to make large games work on that platform).

This was a really smart move and they immediately shot themselves in the foot with the price tag. For $30 this would have probably been a pretty decent deal for people with old consoles that want to play some new CoD multiplayer. Charging $50 for just multiplayer is a little brash.

COD campaigns for 10 bucks sure. Make it happen Activision !

Fitty dalla? Koooootttickkkk!!!

@yummylee: did the ps1 version have If You Must, Ace of Spades and Blitzkrieg Bop? Then you're good.

Those Tony Hawk soundtracks last so much better in my mind than anything in the games themselves and really bring home what Jeff said during that Donald Duck Going Quakers segment...CD audio makes all the difference and PS1 soundtracks hold up 1 billion times better than graphics.

As for the actual topic at hand... price is too high but otherwise I can respect this. For those of us who own the new consoles how much longer do we want to be playing games that work on the old hardware just with slightly shinier graphics? The Xbox 360 came out in 2005. Good night sweet prince and flights of angels sing thee to thy rest.

That Tony Hawk 3 comparison is a great one. I had played the Game Cube and PC versions, then received the PS1 version as a gift at one point. Holy hell, what a difference in those two games. It was seriously like playing a different Tony Hawk game all together. It was neat, but in a way a big "What the fuck?" and played like complete shit by comparison.

I think I only managed to play THPS3 online on the PC once, on the cruise ship level, then it crashed a bunch. Doom Guy is still the best.

Indeed it did. Had a fantastic Downhill level in there too that was a wall rider's wet dream. It also sounds to me that THPS3 should have two separate pages anywhoo judging from how different the PS1 version is.

Seems like $40 would be a more fair price since your getting significantly less content. And is this going to be advertised on the box? What percentage of the Call of Duty player base are more "casual" game players who don't read game news on the internet? Will they be in for a surprise when they put the disc in their 360 or PS3?

@cyborgx7: If you don't have a system that can play current games (console or PC), then you're most likely not that interested enough in games to stay up-to-date. I'm not sure why that statement of fact is either controversial or can be interpreted as "shit[ting] on" people. Sorry that you chose a hobby that has always had a high price barrier for entry?

Feel free to make jokes about the value of a Call of Duty campaign being ten bucks in the comments below.

Ok! It's about as interactive as your average big dumb action movie anyways!

as a ps3 owner, I could care less. I won't be buying another ps3 game, after I pick up the MGS legacy collection the console will be a metal gear machine only.

Dat PS Tripple got GAAAMES....

i actually just tried to play Advanced Warfare on PS3 yesterday only to find the game completely dead, not even a single TDM going on, so I kinda wonder how well a multiplayer only thing would do on that console at this point.

@iamjohn:

That is not fair. People can be very interested in games and have very difficult financial circumstances or be in countries where new consoles are ridiculously expensive.

You can love games passionately and be stuck with new hardware.

But unfortunately that means that you won't be getting a lot of new games until you manage to upgrade. Just the way of things. Lots of people are really into cars but can only afford an old and boring one.

This doesn't seem like the worst thing they could have done. Multiplayer is the main reason people keep coming back for more. The last generation seems like it has been sticking on longer than normal with a reasonable list of releases each year. Persona 5 might just be the last big hurrah before the end.

What are the odds the ten year old console versions of the game don't drop royalties or nothing on the people who worked on the SP but not the MP?

I wonder how long would they even keep the servers up for compare to the current gen versions.

@cyborgx7: He was being facetious... I think.

Th-thanks Activision..

Don't have a lot of money but have enough money to buy online releases and pay for access to PS+/XBL

Jeff i don't know if making fun of those angry people is fair, they like the Call of Duty franchise and understood that this game would be coming to the console they have, and now it is revealed it will be missing a large chunk of content. I know there is a certain sense of "we've moved on" in this industry, but for what could be legit reasons they haven't, and the game was already announced for those platforms.
It's not the first time you've implied that people should buy new consoles, back when Bayonetta 2 was coming out people were angry that they'd need to buy a Wii U, your answer was that if they cared so much they should just buy a Wii U... Well i still haven't bought one, i would love to play Bayonetta 2 but my money goes towards my primary expensive platform which is PC and living costs, i cannot justify buying a Wii U for that 1 game, i know there are other games i could play on it but i probably wouldn't.
The 360 is still my primary console platform.

@awesomeclaw: That's only partially true. It has 512 MB of RAM but it is permanently split with 256 for the Cell and 256 for the GPU. If you ever wonder why it is so incredibly hard to get PS3 games running on a PS4 when it seems like it shouldn't be that much of an issue, this is the reason. First party developers especially used the Cell for a good half of the tasks you'd use a GPU for these days as the GPU was underpowered and had so little RAM while the Cell can hold its own against many low end processors to this day. The thing was an absolute beast but it took half a decade to figure out how to program correctly for it. I would bet PS4 versions of last gen cross-platform games make much more use of the Xbox 360 or PC versions than the PS3 versions as they are much closer to how a PS4 works.

So the Multiplayer is worth $50 and the SP is worth $10? Can I just pay $10 and get the campaign on PS4?

Well, I will happily buy the single-player for 10 bucks on next-gen. No? Not an option? Boo! :)

But I want it like this for current gen! O well I guess it's understandable-ish

There are about 32k players on AW for PS3 at the moment. Almost 29k on 360. The percentage of those players who are hackers/cheaters is anyone's guess.

So they can not buy it, it's not like they have already been sold something. If they preordered it, they should go get their money back.

I primarily play games on PC for the compatibility and LOWER costs. I buy a laptop every 3 years and can justify it as a work expense. If a game doesn't come to computers you just can't play it. Complain to the publishers, or platform developers like Nintendo. I am still waiting for Halo 3 and the newer ones. What is wrong with telling you to buy a Wii U, if you care so much about Bayonetta. Seems the issue has nothing to do with Jeff.

I'm not sure why Jeff thought it would be hard to find people upset by Activision selling a feature-stripped last gen version for only $10 less. Call of Duty really rose to prominence last gen, particularly on the 360, and I would suspect there are lots of people that still play on 360 eagerly looking forward to the next Call of Duty. Also, I think it's a pretty bad assumption that anyone that doesn't own a PS4 or XboxOne doesn't care or follow games.

I find that impossible to believe. I mean, I played BF Bad Company 2 MP on PS3 a year ago and it still had some players at any time.

I had no issues jumping into matches in Battlefield 1943 either, maybe I was just unlucky and tried to play right after some server maintenance downtime, because I tried all the different playlist and just got "No matches found" for everything, at most I got queued with two other people for a mode that would apparently only start with 8 players.

Does Black Ops III have Combat Training? Wonder if that would appear in those versions.

Can't say I ever played any of the CoD campaigns because...I mean why? The multiplayer is all you need anyways, man.

Odd, but okay.

I don't play Call of Duty, so... yeah.

I've been playing Black Ops 2 on 360 for the last month. Surprised theirs still around 70k people playing it (at peak times).

I'm willing to bet that if Activision thought a significant chunk of their player base who cared about single-player was still on old consoles, they would have found a way to cram it in. However, I bet that the correlation between "Cares about CoD single player" and "has or is planning to purchase at least one modern console" is pretty strong.

@cyborgx7:

He said most. While there are certainly people who do care enough about games still on old platforms the majority has jumped ship as it's almost been two whole years. If you care enough about games at this point you should have one (or a PC) unless you're in a real rough spot.

The Xbox version had the audio files visible on the disc, so I grabbed them off the disc on my PC.

make sense I guess. the campaign is a huge cgi fest that probably takes a lot of work to make playable on older consoles.

MKX is one of the few fighting games that constantly gets balance patches. Perhaps the cancellation is partly because they didn't want the effort having to keep an extra two versions updated.

should be noted im one of the weirdos ( like @vinny) who basically only gets these games for the story so if I didnt have a ps4 id be bummed

Should probably be more like $39.99 but hey, it's Activision and they charged $39.99 for The Taken King.
Fuck it!
: )

@dragonzord: PSN is still free on PS3.