Why Buy 'Call of Duty: Black Ops 3' Maps When You Can Make Your Own?

After years of annual releases, the Call of Duty series is getting stale. Still, Call of Duty: Black Ops III, which is slated for release on November 6, is trying its best to shake things up.

Today, developer Treyarch announced that Black Ops III will be the first game since Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare to give players modding tools on PC, allowing them to create their own maps and game modes. Details are pretty thin at the moment, but that's a huge first for the series since it ditched the World War II setting in 2007.

Call of Duty is first and foremost a multiplayer game, meaning the maps that the game comes with are where players will spend most of their time, and a big part of what they're paying for. One way in which publisher Activision squeezes more money out of each game is by releasing downloadable content (DLC) a few month after launch, which includes a new set of maps.

Depending on how much the modding tools Treyarch gives players allows them to do, modders could potentially create an infinite supply of new maps.

Treyarch said that it will let players run their own servers with modified content wherever they like, and will also provide a server browser allowing players to easily find those servers. However, we still don't know just how much freedom the developer will give modders. With a game like Left 4 Dead 2, for example, Valve lets modders to create their own maps, characters, guns—you name it. I doubt modders will get that level of freedom in Black Ops III, but Treyarch said that there is "much more news to come" about modding, so we'll see.

Any game is automatically more interesting the more open it is to modding. A thriving community of modders will always be able to create more game than any one developer. Just look at how nutty Skyrim got post-release, thanks to modding, and imagine what Call of Duty, which has been rehashing the same formula since 2007, would look like if modders got similar access.

"Please remember that this is software development, so things don't always work out exactly as planned," Treyarch said. "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."