The year is 2012. I’m playing a brand new Call Of Duty campaign. Part of it takes place back in the 1980s, where I play as Alex Mason and Frank Woods, tracking down a Nicaraguan arms dealer named Raul Menendez. The other half of the game takes place in 2025, where I play as Alex Mason’s son, David Mason, following in his father’s footsteps as he tracks down Menendez in the future timeline.
A future, I’d like to point out, that is now very much the present. The year is 2025, and soon we’ll be playing the direct sequel to Black Ops II, set a decade into the future in 2035 (and in ten years, I’ll probably be writing a post about how Black Ops X is set in 2045 and it’s a sequel to Black Ops 7 set in 2035).
Players will once again play as David Mason, though this time around he’s played by Heroes and This Is Us star, Milo Ventimiglia. Mason is joined by his old spec ops buddy Harper (Michael Rooker) and faces new and old threats, including the alleged return of Raul Menendez as well as a nefarious tech corporation called The Guild, led by CEO Emma Kagan (Kiernan Shipka). Read more about the campaign, which includes 4-player co-op and an open-world “Endgame” mode, as well as camo unlocks, global weapon progression and more right here.
Treyarch Studios
The year is 2025 and I’m already playing Black Ops 7 multiplayer at an event in Los Angeles at Treyarch Studios. I’ll share my actual gameplay impressions at a later date, but I did have the chance to see an in-depth presentation on the game, play some matches of multiplayer and Zombies and speak with the devs. A lot of what I saw earlier this month, Treyarch showed off at Gamescom this week. Read on to find out everything you need to know about the upcoming game.
Treyarch is a pretty neat studio, with all kinds of Black Ops memorabilia including this monster from last year’s Call Of Duty: Next in Washington, D.C.
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The lobby:
David Mason:
Frank Woods:
The near-future Call Of Duty takes place roughly 30 years before the events of Black Ops III, so we’re not so far into the future as that, and much more “modern” than Infinite Warfare, which is the “distant future”. This means that the game is not quite as futuristic as those titles. There are no wall-running or double-jump mechanics here, though there is a “wall jump” that allows players to double-jump off of a wall, adding a great deal more verticality to multiplayer, and some deadly drops that you’ll have to wall-jump over.
Speaking of the near-future, Activision and Treyarch revealed today that Black Ops 7 will release on November 14th on Xbox, PlayStation and PC. Xbox One and PS4 remain supported systems, which is great news for gamers with older consoles but also a tiny bit ridiculous given how many years it’s been. No word on a Nintendo Switch release.
Multiplayer
Multiplayer builds off of Black Ops 6, which means we’ll see the return of Omnimovement in this game. That means sprinting in all directions, dolphin-diving, roll-over prone and so forth. Obviously, wall-jumping expands the movement set, but mostly this will play very similar to the last game in terms of movement. The one change I noticed was the lack of closed doors that you can peak or bash open. I can’t say for sure that these are gone, but every door I saw during the preview event was an automatic door that simply slides open when you get near.
The game will launch with 16 maps, three of which are remakes of classics: Remade versions of Raid, Hijacked and Express. The other 13 will be new. Outside of these core 6v6 maps, the game will feature larger Skirmish maps. Skirmish mode is a 20v20 objective based mode that takes place on sprawling maps set within Avalon. Teams are tasked with various objectives (like detonating or defusing a bomb) as they wingsuit and grapple around the map, sniping and driving vehicles in a very different type of multiplayer experience.
Black Ops 7 will launch with 30 weapons, including 28 ranged and 2 melee. 16 of these are brand new. The entire arsenal is very “near future” in terms of technology. Black Ops 6 had a lot of older weapons and even some makeshift gear like the cobbled-together RC-XD scorestreak. Weapons and scorestreaks are all decidedly futuristic in Black Ops 7.
There are also more upgrade tracks outside of your guns. A new “Overclock” system allows you to upgrade Lethal and Tactical equipment (frags, smoke grenades etc), Field Upgrades (Trophy Systems, Active Camo, etc.) and Scorestreaks. This gives you some interesting modifiers that you can choose during a match, tweaking how each of these behaves in-game.
Zombies
Treyarch is billing the new Zombies map as the “biggest ever” and compared it to Black Ops II’s Tranzit map during the presentation I attended. That map featured a bus that took players from location to location. In Black Ops 7, you’ll ride in a Wonder Vehicle, driving from each node on the sprawling map as you make your way through the story.
The characters from Black Ops 6 return for this Zombies adventure, but they’re joined by the original quartet from the very first Zombies mode: Richtofen, Nikolai, Takeo and Dempsey. The whole thing takes place in the Dark Aether, and features the big map plus the return of wave-based Survival mode, which will take place on the smaller, individual locations from the main map.
Black Ops 7 will also include Dead Ops Arcade 4, the fun arcade game-within-a-game that we’ve seen in several past Black Ops titles. It’s being billed as the biggest Dead Ops game, with dozens of levels to beat.
Warzone
Activision has been quiet on the Warzone front so far, though plenty of strange occurrences have been taking place in-game lately. The Verdansk Stadium opened up, revealing a missile site with an armed nuclear missile. Mysterious loot crates have appeared on Verdansk and Rebirth Island with strange red substance leaking out of them that looks quite a lot like some of the red ether that some of the enemies in the Black Ops 7 campaign exhibit. Perhaps all signs point to the destruction of Verdansk and the launch of Avalon as the new Warzone map, or it’s all just an elaborate headfake. We shall see.
Black Ops 7 Beta
An open beta for Black Ops 7 kicks off on October 2nd, which is when Early Access for the beta opens up to preorder customers and Game Pass subscribers. The beta runs until October 8th.
The full game will be available day one for Game Pass and Game Pass PC on November 14th. Treyarch developed the title along with Raven Studios.
All told, it looks like a fun continuation of both Black Ops 6 and Black Ops II. Nothing about it is as radically new as Omnimovement was last year, and while the time change is significant, moving from the early 90s to 2035, mostly this is an aesthetic change rather than a major shift in gameplay. It’s unclear at this point whether the 2v2 Gunfight mode is returning, but it doesn’t appear to be judging by what the studio has revealed. That’s a shame if true, though I would rather see MWIII’s excellent 3v3v3 Cutthroat mode make a comeback. That’s still the most fun I’ve had in Call Of Duty in years.
We’ll know more in October when the beta launches and when Activision runs its Call Of Duty: Next event, when we will almost certainly learn more about the future of Warzone as well.
