How Black Ops 7’s development let the studio take risks across its campaign, multiplayer, and endgame mode
The series is in the midst of a bit of an identity crisis, with its consistent stream of crossover skins. We are on the precipice of a new Battlefield title, which has been received incredibly well in two record-breaking betas. On top of that, this year’s entry in the long-running franchise is a sequel to Call of Duty: Black Ops 6, which was released less than 12 months ago.
The last time this happened was with the release of Sledgehammer’s Call of Duty Modern Warfare 3 in 2023. That entry was critically panned for its cobbled-together campaign and a multiplayer that feels like a step back from the rest of the reimagined trilogy. So, what is stopping Black Ops 7 from meeting the same fate?
The answer is that both Black Ops 6 and Black Ops 7 were developed in parallel to one another by the same studio. I had the chance to sit down with Miles Leslie, Associate Creative Director at Treyarch, and Natalie Pohorski, Lead Narrative Producer at Raven Software, at Gamescom 2025 to learn all about it.
We discussed Black Ops 7’s ties to Black Ops 6, bringing the franchise back to the future, the new endgame mode, Avalon, and its inspirations, and, in Pohorski’s own words, the opportunities for the team to craft a “mind-bending, character-driven roller coaster”.
Back to the future
Call of Duty has taken a long break from futuristic entries in the series. The last time the series travelled into the future was with 2018’s Black Ops 4, and you have to go back to 2016’s Infinite Warfare to find a full campaign in that setting.
During this period, fatigue with jetpacks and vertical gameplay led to the series hard-pivoting back to more traditional gameplay for almost a decade. So why is now the right time to step back to the future with Black Ops 7?
“Well, I think it makes a lot of sense for where we’re going with the story,” Pohorski says. “We talk a lot about Black Ops 2,” which Black Ops 7 serves as a direct sequel to. “When we started focusing on David Mason, he was a character we always wanted to return to. A lot has happened for him in 2025, so where does that put him in 2035?”
While David Masion serves as the main protagonist of Black Ops 7, the game also sees the return of Mike Harper (played by Michael Rooker) from Black Ops 2 and Troy Marshall from Black Ops 6, effectively a hall-of-fame for Black Ops characters to a certain degree.
Pohorski follows up with “a lot of time has passed, so I think it was interesting for us, from a storytelling perspective, to get to learn more about these characters and more of what they’re dealing with post the Menendez attacks in 2025.”
Leslie adds, “There were all these loose threads that we wanted to go back to. So it was actually really easy to go, we got to tell that story [set after Black Ops 2], because it’s so ripe for storytelling and gameplay moments”.
Developing both Black Ops 6 and Black Ops 7 together has allowed Raven Software and Treyarch to weave a narrative with more intention than what is usually afforded to Call of Duty studios when there are several years between each entry.
Pohorski describes this experience as “so satisfying”, highlighting that “we have a lot of teams that work on this game, and so it took a lot of planning to make sure that it made sense [during development]”. Leslie follows up, “In Black Ops, we take our story and our characters seriously, and we love planting seeds. So the opportunity to plant [threads] between Black Ops 6 and Black Ops 7 and have a payoff was really intriguing to us.”
Black Ops 7’s main threat, The Guild, was set up during Black Ops 6’s campaign initially as a weapon-smuggling organisation to arm underground criminal organisations in the fictional city of Avalon. But, since then, Sevati Dumas (Sev), one of Frank Woods’ crew during the Black Ops 6 campaign, has led The Guild and grown it into a massive corporate tech company, promoting her protégé Emma Kagan, who now serves as CEO of The Guild.
That kind of interweaving lore and world-building is something we haven’t really seen before in Call of Duty, as characters or locations are often not revisited until years later, and rarely ever planned from the get-go.
“You’ve already met the guild, you’ve already met Avalon,” Leslie says. “Now there’s a payoff for what’s happened in the world. And then we can connect it back to Black Ops 2 and say, ‘remember all these characters in the world’. We love that world-building, and we hope players fall in love with that.”
Embracing the madness
Black Ops 7 also marks a major shift for the series as it leans hard on the more mind-bending aspects of the Black Ops subseries. The future setting affords the studio a lot of luxury to play around with what is believable, but what is it like to strike the right balance between the narrative twists that Black Ops fans love and their expectations from a military shooter?
Leslie believes that the Black Ops name gives Treyarch and Raven permission to be bold and brash when it comes to creating a story where “what you think you expect…[will be] really flipped on its head”.
“Expect the unexpected. That’s what Black Ops delivers. That’s our style, and I think that’s what players fell in love with [Treyarch]. You don’t get what you expect from a sort of normal military shooter”, Leslie remarks. He follows up, highlighting that “coming into Black Ops 7, we knew we were going to the future… but then it was like, what’s the right twist?”
For the team, that twist was the hallucinations that have run throughout the series, but directly confronting your own fear and regrets in a world that is in constant conflict in 2035. Inspiration came from across the whole team as they looked to Memento and Scarecrow’s depictions in Batman for ideas.
“It’s a layer across the whole game,” Leslie emphasises. “It’s what I think makes it special is we like to say, embrace the madness”. That tagline acted as a guiding principle during development.
He continues, “the team got excited behind this sort of mantra… So we’ve got maps. We’ve got equipment that leans into this. We’ve got enemies that lean into it, and it’s across campaign and multiplayer, and it just feels right.”
New game, new risks
One core theme that runs through the Black Ops games is that it has never been afraid of taking risks with its gameplay or narrative. Whether it is Black Ops 1 and Black Ops 2’s campaigns, Treyarch’s Zombies mode and storytelling, or Black Ops 4 taking a lot of bold risks when it comes to multiplayer, including removing automatic health regeneration.
With Black Ops 7, that same mentality comes in the form of an endgame-style, replayable co-op epilogue set in the city of Avalon at the end of the campaign. Leslie believes that “if you look at all the [Black Ops] games… every single game is different. Coming into Black Ops 7, we knew we wanted to innovate on the campaign and make it a more shared, immersive experience.”
This endgame is described as “a brand-new, replayable experience where you and your squad will need to survive overwhelming odds, adapt under pressure, and break the rules of what you thought a Black Ops Campaign could be.”
Once you reach the mission, you will unlock Operators to use and level up via their Combat Rating. You can also bring across your unlocked abilities from the campaign and create custom loadouts. However, failure to survive in the mode will mean your loadouts and combat rating are reset.
Leslie was quick to highlight that if you play through the linear campaign to the end, you will still get a satisfying end to the story. However, it is “a continuation of the story” that is completely optional if players want to jump into it.
Leslie says that the mode’s genesis came from Treyarch’s previous work with Outbreak and the fact that the studio was “building a library with all these fun moments, enemies, and content.” At one point, the studio asked itself, “I want all of that in a different way”.
When pressed about whether they hope this Endgame experience becomes a third replayable pillar in the series alongside Multiplayer and Zombies, Leslie was quick to say the studio only focused on Black Ops right now. But, they do hope that “through the co op campaign and endgame, more players [get] into the story, get immersed in the world, fall in love with the characters”.
So while Black Ops 7 may be following the same release pattern as 2023’s Modern Warfare 3, it seems that it won’t fall into the same traps. There is a lot more meat on the bones this time around, and the game’s development seems far less rushed than Sledgehammer’s latest outing.
Whether that will be enough to draw attention away from Battlefield 6 and a busy Fall season of game releases, we will have to wait and see come November 14, 2025.
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