Earlier this year, Treyarch's Cesar Stastny (Director of Development) hinted that the studio was working on some way to implement modding tools in Black Ops 3 PC.

A few minutes ago, he published a blog post confirming that modding and mapping will be both available in Black Ops 3 PC, though this will happen next year.

Over the years, the Call of Duty® community has proven itself to be among the most passionate in the world – and we count ourselves fortunate to make games for you.

We’ve been listening to one of your top requests and are excited to announce that modding and mapping are coming to Call of Duty: Black Ops 3 PC! We’ve still got a lot of work left to do, but here’s our current plan: 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.

Closed Alpha target date: March 2016 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.

There is much more news to come including updates on Open Beta timing. In order to keep you informed, we’ll periodically publish developer blog posts to share our progress with our fans. Stay tuned to the Treyarch blog for more information.

And yes, this is for real.

Needless to say, this is excellent news for gamers who are interested in buying Call of Duty: Black Ops 3 PC; tell us in the comments section how happy you are to hear about this.

Also, Stastny confirmed a couple days ago that Black Ops 3 PC will feature aim assist for controllers.

@mr_bcarlson Yes, we are keeping it in. — pcdev (@pcdev) October 30, 2015

The game will be available on November 6, later this week, for PC, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One; Black Ops 3 will also release on PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360, but with several features cut such as the campaign mode. These versions will enjoy a slightly lower price as a result.