Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 will strive to keep players returning to its narrative campaign with a new, open-world endgame mode. With extensive unlocks and progression opportunities, 32-player sessions, and a focus on replayability, Treyarch and Raven Software are offering players a reason to stay in the campaign after the credits roll.
A Call of Duty endgame is a new concept. While we’ve had raids and events in previous games that built on campaign story beats, this is something new. More importantly, it’s collaborative and expansive in ways players haven’t seen before.
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After completing the traditional missions in the campaign, the lobby size expands from one to four players to up to 32 players. Not exactly a Warzone lobby, which, at times, allowed for 200 players, but closer to the smaller, 18-66 player lobbies of the DMZ mode. But unlike either DMZ or Warzone, the open world zone of Black Ops 7’s Avalon is entirely player-versus-environment (PVE), for now.
The Black Ops 7 Endgame Is Looking To Break Expectations
Like other games with endgame content, Black Ops 7’s new mode will build on the experience players gained through completing the traditional campaign. While we didn’t get a chance to play the endgame for ourselves at the media event for the game last week, we did hear from the developers about why they focused on building the endgame mode.
The team plans to ‘break the rules’ for what players thought a campaign in Call of Duty could be. Associate creative director at Treyarch, Miles Leslie shared that endgame is “the final proving ground for everything that you’ve earned and learned in the campaign.”
When the development team explained how progression worked in the endgame, it was clear that they had ambitions to build an experience with some substance. The team called it a ‘power journey’ as players work to level up their combat rating, from 1 to 60, gaining skills, abilities, and equipment like the wingsuit, mega jump, or grappling hook.
Design Director Kevin Drew explained, “Here is everything you’re doing in [the] endgame, you’re earning experience, and you’re leveling up your combat rating. Every time you level up, you get to make unique choices. Some of those are very powerful things like increasing your health, damage, [and] mobility. But there’s also what we’re calling skill, specializations, and so you can customize yourself in ways that you’ve never been able to do in [a] campaign, and you’re really trying to push yourself all the way up to combat rating 60.”
The Black Ops 7 endgame is also offering a risk/reward gamble that will be familiar to fans of the DMZ mode and other extraction shooters. If your squad wipes or if you fail to extract, your progress will reset.
How penalizing this system will be is yet to be seen, as many games like this have insurance policies, storage areas, and overall mission progress that persists even between failed runs. Still, it was clear that the dev team wants players to build up their combat rating before engaging with more difficult sections of the endgame.
The developers are baking in risk and reward into this take on an endgame.
Senior director of production, Yale Miller, broke down the stakes, “And then as you go in, there are all kinds of activities and contracts and things that you can do. The world of Avalon is broken up into different, for lack of a better term, difficulty zones where certain areas are gonna have much harder things, video, and you need to be more leveled-up to go into those areas, or you will get annihilated.”
“And then some of those activities and things you can complete on your own. You can join up and complete them together with different squads, or certain activities, and other things will require you to join up with a lot more players to be able to get through things.“
After hearing the overview for the endgame, I had to ask about a possible return of DMZ. Miller left me with a tease, “We’ll talk more about it to come, but you can imagine if you have squads, and you’re going on activities, there could be other activities that you know, search and destroy, and other things where you could pit different squads against each other. You can imagine public events. You can imagine, like, there are lots of things like that that we can play with.” Maybe we’ll hear more details at Call of Duty: Next on September 30th.
