Call of Duty: Black Ops 7

• 1. Introduction

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  Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 reached players on the 14th of November 2025, and within weeks its user score on Metacritic had fallen to 1.5. That was the lowest rating any Call of Duty game had ever received on the site. Yet critics were praising the game's multiplayer and its Zombies mode at the very same moment. Black Ops 7 is the twenty-second main installment in the series and the eighth in the Black Ops line. Treyarch and Raven Software co-developed it, and Activision published it. How does a flagship shooter win over reviewers in some modes and lose its audience in others? What happens in a campaign that players mocked and some critics defended? And why did the studio's use of artificial intelligence tools draw a response from a United States congressman?

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• 2. Avalon Under Siege

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  In June 2035, ten years after JSOC commander David Mason stopped a plot to hijack the American drone fleet, a video of the terrorist Raul Menendez appears online. In it, Menendez says the attacks of 2025 were only the beginning and promises his next move within three days. Milo Ventimiglia voices Mason, who goes by the call sign Section, and Jesse Corti voices Menendez. Within hours, a technology giant called the Guild, run by CEO Emma Kagan and played by Kiernan Shipka, vows to defend humanity.

  Colonel Troy Marshall, played by Y'lan Noel, does not trust the Guild's motives. He sends Mason and his unit, Specter One, to Avalon, the Mediterranean city-state where the Guild is based. The team includes Mike Harper, played by Michael Rooker, and Eric Samuels, played by John Eric Bentley. The fourth member is Leilani Tupuola, nicknamed 50/50 and played by Frankie Adams.

  Inside a Guild laboratory, Specter One is ambushed and exposed to a hallucinogenic toxin. Only the cybernetic enhancements in their brains and bodies keep the four alive. Trapped in a vision of Nicaragua, Mason confronts an apparition of Menendez. The team escapes with a quantum computer drive and destroys the laboratory. The toxin then spreads across Avalon, and the civilian population is forced to evacuate.

  Chloe Lynch, a JSOC operative known as Karma and played by Erin Cahill, helps the team search for an insider still hiding in the city. The next hallucination brings back Frank Woods, Mason's late mentor, played by Damon Victor Allen. Woods confesses the trauma of being imprisoned and tortured by Menendez in Angola. He also admits to accidentally killing Mason's father, Alex Mason, played by Chris Payne Gilbert. The vision ends in a fight against Woods, who has been warped into a giant plant monster. Afterward, Mason forgives him, and Woods urges Mason to heal from his own past.

  The insider tells the team that the toxin is called the Cradle. Marshall and Karma add that the Guild used deepfake technology to fake the Menendez video. To read the stolen drive, Specter One raids a server farm in search of a quantum computer. Meanwhile, Marshall sends a second unit, Specter Two, to a Guild facility in Tokyo. Its leader, Slade Barrick, called Razor and played by Joshua Dov, transmits what looks like a decryption key. It instead wipes most of the drive's remaining data, exposing Razor as a Guild double agent.

  Further shared hallucinations follow, each drawn from the private traumas of a team member. Back in Avalon, the team moves to seize Dr. Gideon Falkner, a Guild scientist who studies how the Cradle affects their cybernetics. Falkner points them toward a Guild building called the Sanctum, where Kagan ambushes them. There, Specter One meets a hallucination of Alex Mason as a cruel and controlling warden of Vorkuta. The team escapes by restoring the positive memories that Mason and his father shared.

  Kagan's plan becomes clear. She intends to spread terror with the Cradle, blame the fake Menendez, and profit by presenting the Guild as the heroes. Specter One tries to stop shipments leaving the Avalon docks, and Razor is sent to block them. The team kills him. Marshall then points them to a mining rig off the coast. Beneath it lies a vast underwater manufacturing complex, which they destroy by making the Cradle's bioreactor explode. They also capture Kagan, who shows no remorse, so that her crimes can be exposed.

  Shortly after her arrest, her right-hand man, Alden Dorne, frees Falkner from containment. Falkner heads for a coastal base near Avalon, hoping to release the Cradle on the city again. Specter One, still heavily under the toxin's influence, hunts him down. Falkner's death makes the Cradle dissipate. Marshall and Karma then order the team after Dorne, who is already rallying the Guild somewhere else.

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• 3. Modes And Movement

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  Eleven missions make up the campaign, which up to four players can tackle together. Finishing all of them unlocks Endgame, a mode that drops up to 32 players into Avalon with a series of objectives and a strict time limit. Players bring a custom loadout and pick one major and one minor ability for their character. Dying costs them their gear. A skill tree adds buffs during a match, and its progress carries over between successful exfiltrations.

  Across every mode, players move in any direction and can wall jump off selected walls. Black Ops 6 gave all players a Tactical Sprint, a limited burst of extra speed. Black Ops 7 removes it from core movement and offers it only as a perk.

  Two teams of six, named JSOC and the Guild, face off in multiplayer. Standard playlists include Team Deathmatch, Domination, Hardpoint, and Overload. The exception is Skirmish, an objective mode with 20 players per side on two dedicated maps. Experience points come from kills, objectives, and challenges, and also from the campaign and Zombies. Perks come in three combat specialties, and new hybrid specialties reward mixing perks from two of them. An Overclock system adds extra abilities to equipment, scorestreaks, and field upgrades.

  At level 55, players may enter the Prestige system, which sends them back to level 1 in exchange for rewards. They can repeat this up to ten times. Fully leveled weapons can be prestiged too. That unlocks cosmetics such as camos and charms but locks every attachment again.

  Zombies spreads four maps across a storyline that picks up immediately after Black Ops 6 Zombies, with two more maps expected in later seasons. Players earn two currencies, Essence and Salvage, to open new areas, upgrade weapons, craft equipment, and buy perks and armor. Augments modify perks, field upgrades, and ammo mods, and single-use GobbleGums grant brief effects. The Directed mode from Black Ops 6 returns and guides players through a map's main quest.

  Three newer modes sit beside the standard game. Survival asks players to last as long as possible in small sections of the main maps. Cursed is a harder version, with modifiers called Relics, no loadout weapons, no mini-map, and a classic scoring system inspired by Call of Duty: Black Ops III from 2015. Dead Ops Arcade 4 revives a top-down shooter that had appeared in several earlier Black Ops games.

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• 4. Built In Parallel

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  Two games were green-lit together when Treyarch began work on Black Ops 7, and the other was Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 from 2024. The two productions then ran at the same time. Lead narrative producer Natalie Pohorski said this let Treyarch and Raven build more directly on what Black Ops 6 had established. Jack Wall, who scored the earlier game, composed the music again.

  Beenox handled the Windows version. A long list of other Activision groups also helped, among them Activision Shanghai, Demonware, Digital Legends, High Moon Studios, Infinity Ward, and Sledgehammer Games.

  As it did with Black Ops 6, the team used generative artificial intelligence to help make some in-game assets. Associate creative director Miles Leslie told IGN that Treyarch saw the tools as an aid. He said they "do not replace any of the fantastic team members" who finish the work. Yale Miller, Treyarch's director of production, spoke to journalists at a pre-release event and said the team was "still figuring … out" the technology.

  Cole Martin of Windows Central watched that exchange and wrote that Miller "danced around the topic like a pro." Martin felt Miller's body language made clear that he did not want to linger on the subject. That uneasy moment previewed an argument that would later grow far beyond a press event and reach a member of Congress.

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• 5. Marketing Campaign

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  On the 8th of June 2025, Activision and Microsoft showed a cinematic trailer at the Xbox Games Showcase. It revealed the title and the story premise. The same day, Variety reported the first cast details, including Milo Ventimiglia as Mason and Kiernan Shipka as Kagan. Michael Rooker was confirmed as returning to play Mike Harper, whom he had also played in Black Ops II.

  Later in June, a teaser appeared on the Cordis Die YouTube channel, which had been used to promote Black Ops II in 2012. In August, Activision released several live-action teasers about the Guild and launched a viral website for the fictional company. Forbes and Wired also ran sponsored articles about the Guild.

  The full reveal came on the 19th of August at Gamescom. Treyarch and Raven discussed the campaign, the story, and Endgame. A 17-minute Direct presentation was released alongside it, covering multiplayer, Zombies, and progression. An Activision blog post also said that some Black Ops 6 weapons and character skins would carry forward into Black Ops 7.

  On the 26th of August, Activision canceled that plan. Community sentiment held that the Black Ops 6 skin catalog had drifted from the series' visual identity. That catalog included crossovers with Squid Game, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and Beavis and Butt-Head. On the 10th of September, Treyarch partly reversed course. Four Zombies character skins, unlocked by finishing Black Ops 6 main quests, would carry over. So would a Samuels skin, unlocked by reaching Prestige rank 1000 in Black Ops 6.

  Trailers and blog posts for multiplayer and Zombies followed on the 22nd and the 24th of September. Live footage of both modes reached the public at the 2025 Call of Duty: Next event on the 30th of September.

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• 6. Release And Beta

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  Early access to the open beta began on the 2nd of October for players who had pre-ordered the game or held an Xbox Game Pass subscription. Everyone else could join on the 5th of October, and the beta ended on the 9th. It covered multiplayer and the Zombies survival map Vandorn Farm. One experiment was an Open Moshpit playlist, in which matchmaking gave far less weight to skill. Players liked it so much that Treyarch and Activision made it the default matchmaking system for the full release.

  On release day, the game launched for PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Windows, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S. Subscribers to select Xbox Game Pass plans, including Game Pass Ultimate and PC Game Pass, could play immediately. Cloud services such as GeForce Now and Xbox Cloud Gaming also offered it.

  The Windows version asks for TPM 2.0 and Secure Boot to be enabled. Activision said the rule exists to "provide the strongest safeguard possible" against cheaters in multiplayer. After launch, Treyarch planned seasonal updates adding maps, weapons, modes, premium battle passes, and crossover items.

  Black Ops 7 is the last Call of Duty game released for PlayStation 4 and Xbox One. It is also the last in the series to arrive on Xbox Game Pass at launch. Starting with Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4, the following year's game, installments are slated to join the service a year after release.

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• 7. Critics Divided

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  Metacritic summarized the reviews as "mixed or average," while OpenCritic found that only 34 percent of critics recommended the game. Its consensus called the game "ambitious yet inconsistent," with strong multiplayer and Zombies alongside a divisive campaign.

  Simon Cardy of IGN scored the co-op campaign 6 out of 10 and called it "simply okay," a mode that took "some big swings" without landing them all. S.E. Doster of GameSpot found "some successful missions" and "plenty of emotional character moments." She thought the plot twists and the villain were "a little underbaked." Ford James of Polygon and Ben Kerry of Pure Xbox were harsher and judged it a weak entry for the series.

  Several outlets criticized the solo experience. It has no computer-controlled companions, no mid-mission checkpoints, and no way to pause. Jeremy Peel of Eurogamer concluded that co-op play was essential for anyone wanting the best version.

  Multiplayer fared better. Keith Stuart of The Guardian said it offered "a lot … to enjoy for perennial conscripts of carnage." Doster liked the omnidirectional movement and the wall jump for creating more vertical space and more angles of attack. Kevin Dunsmore of Hardcore Gamer praised a healthy mix of small, medium, and large 6v6 maps. Cole Martin agreed about those maps but found the 20v20 Skirmish mode "surprisingly lacking."

  Zombies received mostly positive notices. Dunsmore called the launch map, Ashes of the Damned, a "massive, sprawling adventure filled with twists and turns." Doster enjoyed its dark, haunting Dark Aether setting and valued Vandorn Farm as a lighter alternative. Martin named Dead Ops Arcade 4 a personal highlight. Will Borger of IGN was less convinced and described Zombies as "a shambling corpse that reminds us of the person it used to be." Reviewers were not the ones who made the loudest noise, though.

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• 8. Players Revolt

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  Review bombing on Metacritic gave Black Ops 7 its reputation among players. Complaints centered on the co-op campaign, including technical performance and the missing pause button. Players also mocked a boss fight against a giant biomechanical soldier by comparing it to Skibidi Toilet.

  Generative AI drew a second wave of anger. Players pointed to several calling cards that they said imitated the work of Studio Ghibli. Activision told media outlets that it uses AI tools to "empower and support" its teams, and that its creative process "continues to be led by the talented individuals in our studios." United States representative Ro Khanna, who has called for AI regulation, said artists "need to have a say in how AI is deployed."

  Rhys Elliott, head of market analysis at Alinea Analytics, saw deeper causes. He pointed to a lack of innovation in the series and to long-running frustrations, including a "focus on heavy microtransactions … over core gameplay quality." He also named the "Fortnite-like cosmetic items" that had crept into the game.

  The sales figures matched the mood. According to Circana, Black Ops 7 was the fifth best-selling game in the United States for 2025. That was the lowest year-end rank for a Call of Duty title since Call of Duty: World at War in 2008. In Europe, opening-week sales were more than 50 percent below Black Ops 6's launch sales and 63 percent below EA's Battlefield 6. In Japan, the PlayStation 5 version sold 12,311 retail copies, the weakest start for the series there.

  On Steam, Black Ops 7 peaked above 100,000 concurrent players over its launch weekend, against roughly 315,000 for Black Ops 6. Hayley Williams of GameSpot noticed that Activision left player statistics out of its launch-weekend social media posts, though it had included them for Black Ops 6 and earlier games.

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