With Call of Duty: Black Ops 7, Treyarch wants to redefine what Call of Duty can be. "That's sort of our thing," laughs Miles Leslie, associate creative director. He's not wrong. It was Black Ops that first introduced the co-op campaign to Call of Duty, along with features such as Blackout, Pick 10, Scorestreaks, Theater Mode, and Zombies. The studio has a reputation for breaking boundaries in a way that captures the attention of millions of players.
Delivering back-to-back installments to the Black Ops universe for the first time in Call of Duty history surely makes sense for Activision Blizzard, then (and for Microsoft, looking to recoup the $69 billion it spent to acquire the publisher). Still, there is this lingering fear that a year simply isn't enough time to deliver a worthy continuation. We need only look to 2023's Modern Warfare 3 as the example, an under-torqued expansion that demonstrated just how quickly franchise fatigue can set in among the faithful.
