Something has got to break with the AAA industry soon, right? Like we’ve heard time and time again that the costs of making these top tier games is rising to wild levels and that’s the reason you see so many of them going down the monetisation rabbit hole that’s enshittifying many long running IPs. But then there are numerous up and coming development studios working on pennies to the dollar of these AAA developers that are able to build experiences that in many ways surpass what they’re able to achieve and avoid falling into the live service/microtransaction monetisation trap. BioWare seems to be the first developer that’s falling prey to this, their only saving grace being the next Mass Effect game, but I can’t help but feel that there’s a lot more who are about to crest that hill.
None more apparent is those who were involved in the latest Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 development.
Things didn’t go well to start off with when the game asked me to update my TPM on my motherboard in order to play it. Now my PC isn’t exactly new at this stage, it’s coming on 6 years at this point, but there hasn’t been any other game that’s asked me to do anything of the sort to get it playing. This involved no less than 2 BIOS updates in order to allow it to happen, forcing me to break out multiple USB sticks in order to get it working. So right at the start I was already soured on what this COD instalment was going to bring to the table.
There’s also the fact that there’s some 6+ separate development houses involved which should tell you something’s not going well here. To be sure, the Call of Duty IP has grown to be quiet the beast over the past decade with it now needing to support no less than 4 different game modes that each have their own dedicated fanbase. For the uninitiated that’s: single player campaign, traditional multiplayer, zombies and finally warzone. There’s been attempts to make that somewhat less daunting of a development challenge over the years, combining progression systems and whatnot, but it’s clear that the demands of each of those distinct game modes is starting to stretch what a “Call of Duty” game really is.
This became quite apparent to me when the game informed me that the campaign was online only. Old gamers will remember how bad of an idea that this was thanks in no small part to the original Titanfall attempting to do the same thing. That campaign experience was, at best, mixed and it served as the warning shot for anyone else who would seek to attempt it. Activision, for whatever reason, decided to ignore that and the campaign is all the more worse for it. Sure, you can turn off squad fill and play it by yourself (although even though I did that I’d still get matched with people half the time) but it’s clear that a lot of missions are designed with multiple people in mind. If you’ve got a squad that plays together regularly then this isn’t a problem but I don’t think I’m alone in wanting a curated single player experience that doesn’t have me relying on other yahoos to get it done.
The strain between game modes becomes rapidly apparent as you go through the campaign as it will put you back into the same map several times, the one I assume is the warzone map, whilst also filtering you through numerous other zombie and multiplayer maps. This would be OK except for the fact that traversal in the warzone based maps is wildly different to that of the singleplayer ones and that the multiplayer maps are, shocker, mostly the same as the maps from previous COD BLOPS instalments. I get it, making assets for a one and done campaign is money that they’d prefer to spend elsewhere, but the mishmash of different gameplay modes in a campaign just doesn’t make for great game play.
I think all of this grates me so much because, at its core, there’s still a lot of the things that I like about a COD BLOPS game in there. The shooting is as slick and fast paced as ever, the visuals have received yet another upgrade to satisfy my eye candy cravings and the fully unified progression system was something I was actually excited about. I’ve always lamented the initial grind you have to go through to feel even a little bit competitive in multiplayer but, with the campaign providing you a headstart on that (I was level 22 I think by the time I was finished) I thought I’d be pumped to move right on into multi.But all of this second hand cognitive dissonance in how the game played made me feel the opposite.
Capping this all off was the unfortunately ham fisted attempt at reintroducing Mason back into the series. The Black Ops series was always known for its more cerebral, psychological thriller vibes and it was always done in a way that made you question everything that was going on, down to weather or not what you were seeing was reality. This time around though? There’s no guessing at all, instead you’re immediately told that what you’re seeing isn’t real and the game recklessly uses this alternative world to build out set pieces to suit Activision’s corporate agenda. There’s nothing cerebral about it at all; the smartest Call of Duty has been dumbed down to a drug induced fever dream with subtly of a brick to the face.
Call of Duty was once that old dependable friend for me: a game which didn’t ask much of me and I didn’t expect much of it. But it seems over time the weight of AAA development, monetisation and the need to pack ever more game into a single title has finally made it burst at the seams. What the IP needs is a reset, a rethink of what the core aspects of the game need to be and what needs to be spun off into its own thing. As it stands today there’s just too much and too many people involved in its creation on a yearly basis and it shows in the scatterbrained attempt at putting it all together under one banner. There’s still a part of me wanting to go back, to give the multi a go, but even if it was the best one to date it still wouldn’t change my opinion on where this IP needs to go.
Rating: 6.0/10
Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 is available on PC, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S right now for $109.95. Game was played on the PC with a approximately 6 hours playtime and 17% of the achievements unlocked.
