The reveal of Black Ops 7 has sent fans into a frenzy, but Call of Duty desperately needs to find a new sub-series to avoid going stale.
After a show full of exciting reveals, the Xbox Games Showcase 2025 surprised everyone by ending with the first trailer for Call of Duty: Black Ops 7. It’s set to be a sequel to 2012’s Black Ops 2, featuring a new campaign, fresh multiplayer maps, and the next chapter of the ongoing Zombies story.
This continues the franchise’s overreliance on Black Ops and Modern Warfare, as every game since 2018, apart from Vanguard, has fallen into one of these sub-series.
It’s hardly surprising, since both have spawned some of the best first-person shooters ever made, but it’s time to move on.
It’s time for CoD to try something new
As soon as the BO7 trailer went live, social media was flooded with eager fans ready to jump back into the yearly CoD hype cycle. But while seeing Mason, Menendez, and more familiar faces had a lot of the community foaming at the mouth, all I could manage was an eye roll.
I love Black Ops as much as the next guy, but do we really need four in seven years? There are only so many hours you can spend in one universe, so many times you can bring back the same old characters and squeeze them into an increasingly convoluted timeline before it starts to get old. Just look at Star Wars.
The yearly release cycle has come under fire many times over the years, but the one upside is that we used to get a fresh experience every 12 months. For every Black Ops, there was a standalone like Advanced Warfare or WW2 to keep things interesting, so by the time a sequel rolled around, you were itching to jump back in.
However, after Infinite Warfare and Vanguard failed to keep players onboard after launch, the series is too scared to take a risk. Activision knows that slapping Black Ops or Modern Warfare on the box is guaranteed to move units, so even after a full year of Black Ops 6, we’re going back to the well once again.
The same is true for Modern Warfare. After it reinvented the FPS genre in the late 2000s, we’re onto the third game of a rebooted trilogy that seems destined to go on forever. It certainly won’t be ending any time soon, either, as leaks have suggested that the 2026 release will be Modern Warfare 4.
ActivisionAll of this is making the once-pioneering shooter feel more predictable than ever. Of course, we’ll get some new features and a fresh campaign to blast through, but Call of Duty is starting to feel like an artist living off their greatest hits rather than bringing anything fresh to the table.
We know how these games play. We know which guns to expect. We know which maps we’ll see. They’re fun, there’s no denying that, but where’s the ambition?
After a promising launch, Black Ops 6’s player count dipped considerably. While there were plenty of other factors at play, such as the ongoing problem with cheaters, many simply got bored with what they were playing.
I’m not saying that CoD is dying, it’s far too big and makes far too much money for that to happen any time soon. But there’s a real risk of it becoming dull by trying to appease fans, instead of taking a big creative swing.
Now, more than ever, Call of Duty needs to mix things up with a new series. Give us a new universe to fall in love with, a different setting we’ve never explored.
Sure, there’s the risk that it might flop and turn some skeptics away, but if it resonates with fans, it could also breathe new life into the franchise and set up another series for Activision to hang their hat on.
