It’s a critical year for Call of Duty because Battlefield 6 is showing up on October 10 with the technological advantage of amazing destructible environments. But Activision revealed its completely different and equally valid take on a shooter arriving on November 14.
As part of Geoff Keighley’s Opening Night Live, Activision revealed a trailer of the first gameplay for Call of Duty: Black Ops 7. This game is a follow-up to last year’s title, Call of Duty: Black Ops 6, which was set in 1991.
The new game features an old enemy, Raul Menendez, the psychopath who set off a global war in Call of Duty: Black Ops 2. Black Ops 7 is set in 2035, and Menendez is back to cause more trouble.
To stop him, the grunts of secret U.S. government forces are out to stop him. But there’s another faction that may be just as much trouble: The Guild, a technology company headed by a visionary named Emma Kagan. It has an army of drones, robots and other AI-enabled technologies that are killing machines. Some of the missions take place in a futuristic place called Avalon, which I suspect is the home base for The Guild.
And here’s where the story gets interesting. The Guild has a technology that simulates reality and builds a world around you that feels real. It’s like a metaverse, or the Star Trek Holodeck. And in this kind of world, anything can happen.
Why does this fit in an ongoing Call of Duty subfranchise called Black Ops, or Black Operations that don’t officially exist? Because Black Ops has always had a hallucination side to it, like the Far Cry games from Ubisoft. You go into a drug-induced haze and all of a sudden the developers get to unleash their imagination upon you. Instead of just a fighting game, it becomes an imaginative work of art that has dream-like sequences or nightmares that the protagonists must overcome.
In the Black Ops lore, the 1960s-based original Black Ops story was about the U.S. government agencies’ experiments upon soldiers with various kinds of drugs that could unhinge them from reality and make them into killing machines. The hallucinations have continued throughout the series.
And so it makes sense that this story winds up in AI-based sci-fi story that . And it’s going to raise an interesting question for fans. Is this Call of Duty, grounded in reality? Or is it some kind of weird sci-fi tale?
In our own AI-filled world, you could ask the same question. Are we living in sci-fi, or is there a real modern world somewhere in all this news around AI.
On a more practical front, will this story be so compelling that it can overcome the curse that strikes shooter games when they veer from modern warfare into another setting. Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare failed to generate big commercial sales and critical praise when it came out in 2016. It was a full sci-fi game, set in the 22nd century — complete with Star Wars-style combat spacecraft fighters.
Closer to today, Electronic Arts’ Battlefield 2042 was also a similar failure. It had a lot of bugs, an unfocused design, maps that were too large and missing basic features like scoreboards.
We’ll find out if Call of Duty: Black Ops 7, which isn’t too far in the future — just 10 years — could break the sci-fi curse. Perhaps because AI warfare is already so prevalent in the drone battles between Russia and Ukraine, this might be a more palatable version. We’ll find out soon enough.
The core game
While the single-player campaign will be a rea test. There’s a lot to like in the core details of Black Ops 7. The game will have a campaign that is playable solo or with up to four co-op human friends. The main characters — representing those four players — are David Mason, Mike Harper, Eric Samuels, and Leilani de Polla. They are part of Spectre team.
The sharp-eyed observers will notice that two of those characters will gather for a meeting to pay respects at the gravestone of Frank Woods, one of the star characters of the series who was in a wheelchair in Black Ops 6.
That campaign will actually extend into the multiplayer realm with its endgame.
Zombies with the Wonder vehicle
The multiplayer combat, which I have played, will introduce a 20v20 multiplayer Skirmish mode, and 16 new weapons — including Peacekeeper MK1, MA-DAO, Orion pistol, and the Eagle assault rifle. Multiplayer updates include overclocks for equipment, hybrid combat specialties, and new score streaks.
Skirmish mode has multiple versions including capture, destroy and takeover. This is the obviously anti-Battlefield big party combat mode.
The UI/UX overhaul features C-Link for enhanced connectivity and immersive score streaks. This shares intel with your squad.
Zombies returns with a new Dark Aether storyline and the original crew. That crew — Tank Dempsey, Nikolai Belinski, Takeo Masaki, and Edward Richtofen — —first appeared in the map Shi No Numa, which was released as part of the Call of Duty: World at War Zombies mode in 2009.
The Zombies mode will have a sizable map that ties into the narrative of weird hallucinations for Black Ops tales. The map itself hearkens back to the transit bus in Black Ops II’s Zombies mode. In this Zombies mode, you can drive a vehicle that you can decorate so that it becomes like a fifth character. Each station along the way offers a self-continaed arena to fight Zombies in a round-based mode. But you can get into the car and drive to the next place, in a kind of of infinite circle.
The Zombies map features survival maps, a Bermuda Triangle theme, and Dead Ops Arcade. The latter is an arcade machine with a full animated Zombies game inside it. More details will be spilled in September on Zombies mode. A new Call of Duty Next event is coming on September 30.
Multiplayer mode
The multiplayer game will launch with 16 maps, including classics like Raid, Express, and Hijacks. Carry-forward content from Black Ops 6 will be available at launch, with more at season one. The Ricochet anti-cheat tech will be available at launch, as well as secure boot requirements.
Kevin Drew, design director at Treyarch, talked about the endgame campaign and how Prestige will work. You will be able to reach an interminable number of levels for Prestige. Now you will be able to earn points toward Prestige no matter what you are doing — whether it is multiplayer, Zombies or the single-player/co-op campaign.
And you can also level up your weapons in another kind of Prestige, which comes with rewards. The game will have seasons for multiplayer, a Battle Pass and new weekly challenges that offer content unlocks for loadouts across all connected modules.
Omnimovement is still part of the game — sadly for me, as I didn’t master it — but there is one change. You can no longer do a tactical sprint, unless you designated a specific earned Gung Ho perk for that sprinting ability — something that the guys who spend all of their time running around with knives out in multiplayer.
There is a lot of other movement that is possible in 2035. You can now jump and run on walls, do a combat at roll, and move while your gun is mounted on a flat surface. You can also use a grappling hook to pull yourself to the tops of buildings or engage in a “mech jump” that can also take you over walls and to building tops.
The game has graphics improvements like dynamic terrain deformation, voxel-based order-independent transparency, and improved fog effects.
Crazy Black Ops and controlling fear
In a briefing, Yale Miller, head of production at Treyarch, said that the team on Black Ops pushed themselves to make a unique experience. They did concept and development work in parallel with work on Black Ops 6.
“We pushed ourselves to make a unique experience and do only things Black Ops could. We pushed the envelope” on the campaign, Zombies and multiplayer, he said.
Miles Leslie, associate creative director at Treyarch, said the team was feeding off the Black Ops 6 work, and they wanted to reward players for the time they put into the campaign for the first time ever. They wanted to “embrace the madness, going into a world of fear, like only Black Ops can do.” And the team wanted to put awesome toys into players’ hands: guns, gadgets, operators and a narrative. .
He noted that Black Ops 2 took place in 1986 and 1989, Black Ops 6 took place in 1991, and Black Ops 2 also took place in 2025. And Black Ops 7 is 2035. The story blends Black Ops 2 and Black Ops 6, with diverse and epic missions. The locations vary from the Mediterranean coast of Avalon to “neon-soaked” Tokyo and even [David] Mason’s “fractured psyche.”
John Zook, creative director of Raven Software, said that Raul Menendez, “thought dead, is back, vowing to burn the world down. The Guild promises protection.” And it has a mind altering weapon that turns fear into a tool of war. And a global threat is set in motion.
“The ultimate battle isn’t just about survival. It’s overcoming the control over fear,” Zook said.
David “Section” Mason is the son of Alex Mason. Alex was the protagonist of the original Call of Duty: Black Ops, and he was killed during Black Ops 2.
David Mason has been a pillar of strength for the team, said Natalie Pohorski, lead producer at Raven, but he struggles with internal doubts as he holds his team together and learns to deal with the past.
Troy Marshall, who appears in Black Ops 6, is now an old man with silver hair. He speaks with David Mason at the gravestone of Frank Woods, another key character from the Black Ops franchise. In Black Ops 6 circa 1991, Woods was in a wheelchair. They discuss whether they’re fighting Menendez or possible the Guild is behind what’s happening.
The game will take players to Nicaragua, Angola, Tokyo, Alaska and Avalon.
The final battle
Kevin Drew, design director of PvE experiences, said there will be closure in the final mission of the campaign. But there will also be a 12th mission, as the credits roll. In this endgame, the sessions become a multiplayer game with up to 32 players. This brings replayability to the campaign in the same way it does with Zombies, Drew said.
In the hallucinatory level, the squad is gassed in a room at The Guild and they all pass out. Then they awake inside a crazy world, where a giant machete falls through the world. Then they start fighting robots using grappling hooks, grenade launcher rifles and more. It’s a very sci-fi part of the game with floating islands and wingsuits.