This beta is a bummer. In a year where the competition for the shooter space is tighter than ever, Call of Duty offers more of the same. After visiting Treyarch and hearing about what was planned for Black Ops 7, I was excited! But the reality of playing Call of Duty in 2025 brought my hype crashing back down to earth.
Tackling the positives first. If you wanted more Black Ops 6, you’ll get that with this sequel. Omni-movement, the refreshing and responsive movement system from last year’s title, continues to improve for the better. Sliding, twisting around while prone, tucking yourself in and out of cover felt slick and natural. Wall jumping adds an extra option to addressing higher platforms, clearing gaps, and jumping around corners for a surprise shot at foes.
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I mostly stuck with my trusty Assault weapons and occasionally ventured into SMG land. However, I felt the shock of turning a corner and feeling a shotgun obliterate me. It felt a little early to know what would be overpowered. The maps have long sightlines for sniping, small corridors for close quarters combat, and some had rotating geometry for moving with cover or wall jumping over. Spawn flips happen with all small multiplayer modes, but I felt like the spawn points were less frustrating and exploitable.
Black Ops 7 has a lot of promise, but this multiplayer Beta is leaving a lot to be desired.
The art direction, sound design, and maps felt authentic to Call of Duty, even if they lack their own unique character. Shifting the 90s aesthetic of Black Ops 6 to the future war, but entirely familiar to those who played last year. The enhancements to the gunsmith system, the ability to overclock your grenades, scorestreaks, and field upgrades tease a release with a lot of level progression to get sucked into. And the past promise of shared progression offers those XP incentives, without prescribing or limiting what modes or with whom a player wants to play.
Weapons, camos, equipment, and XP progression moving across the different parts of Black Ops 7 package was a priority that was reiterated in to the press and the marketing material around this game. It’s an invitation to build, customize and share your experience, assuming you have people to do it with. But factors, both external and specific to Call of Duty, left my friend group of former CoD diehards queuing up to play something else.
One of my friends who joined to play the beta put it best. “Call of Duty asks a lot of its fans.” Whether it’s financially, with the swiftness it raised game prices under the guise of cross-generation versions of games, or its willingness to sell expensive skin packs and then limit them to only Warzone between releases.
As a response to the community backlash over the tonal inconsistencies between some of Call of Duty’s past crossover skins, Treyarch backpedaled on their promise that future skins will carry forward from Black Ops 6. Ironically, this comes after dropping carry forward for MW3 and older. Call of Duty presents itself as a platform, but the inconsistency of its cosmetic plan makes it a difficult one to invest in.
The business of Call of Duty became the business of Game Pass last year. However, unsatisfied with the financial rewards of making the largest acquisition in history, Microsoft has chosen to shake down its player base by raising Game Pass prices and locking Black Ops 7 behind the Ultimate tier, which costs 50 percent more. This pricing update prompted one of my friends to cancel, and another who had planned to renew for the release to save his money for something else.
If you’re planning to buy the game on PC, you may not be immune to the subtle market push to spend more money. Following the chain of companies requiring kernel-level anti-cheat, Activision is requiring TPM 2.0 and Secure Boot to be enabled. Beyond being an invasive requirement, it locks out users with hardware that can technically run the game. And from online reports and my own experience in the Beta, it hasn’t solved the cheating problem either. Another friend who made the effort of downloading the beta on her PC chose to play another game once the TPM 2.0 requirements blocked her hardware.
Black Ops 7 is held back by its hardware requirements, launcher, and chat.
And regardless of platform, players are forced to use the convoluted Call of Duty launcher to play this year’s beta. While less messy and buggy than it was a few years ago, it still feels unnecessary and sometimes confusing for players who’d rather just launch a specific game. The launcher requires the player to select their Call of Duty game from an ever-changing menu, rather than the platform-specific games list, unlike most other video games.
I found myself troubleshooting Call of Duty launcher installation issues for others over Discord voice chat. Constant restarts abound, as the Call of Duty launcher swaps between games, occasionally crashing for me and my buddies. Shader compilation had us waiting to begin our matches. And once we got into games, the game found ways to crash on one of my friends repeatedly while we queued for a match. After more two hours and restarts than games played together, he was done with the Beta too.
Playing solo, I was met with the eerie silence of modern Call of Duty lobbies. AI voice chat moderation has definitely reduced the number of slurs I hear between games, but shit talking, coordinating, and joking during matches have all but disappeared. However, the AI still fails to moderate the occasional PlayStation controllers’ microphones echo back their players game audio or random Instagram Reels to the exhausted and annoyed lobby. Some things never change.
Finally, the Battlefield 6 of it all is hanging over this experience. The contrast to Call of Duty’s lack of destruction, its smaller scale matches, and the yearly release cycle of incremental upgrades are felt more strongly this year. However, one thing Black Ops 7 with Battlefield 6 is a requirement for TPM 2.0.
It’s all competing for the same $70 ($30 a month if you can swing paying the new Game Pass cost) as EA’s shooter. There are a bunch of reasons to invest your time in Black Ops 7. I’m really excited to try the campaign endgame and dig into the wave-based zombies mode. It still feels great to click heads in Call of Duty, maybe better than ever. But if you’re like me, you’ll probably end up spending that money and time where your friends do.
I don’t blame the development team for Microsoft’s balance sheet ballooning the cost of gaming. But I do think some choices could be avoided to make this game more accessible to more players. I still don’t understand why it’s an acceptable user experience to force players to start the game and then restart their games, on both pc and console, for updates.
Call of Duty needs to be accessible to its players. Right now, it’s not.
I shouldn’t need to video call with a friend and direct them through their system bios so their computer plays nice with Call of Duty’s anti-cheat system. Finally, Call of Duty must resolve its visual identity issues and offer clarity on the Carry Forward options for guns and skins into future titles.
While I had some fun with the multiplayer beta again this year, it’s never been so lonely. During the lifetime of 2022’s Modern Warfare 2 reboot, I played countless hours with my friends, haunting Al Mazrah in DMZ mode. We would stay up to ungodly hours to cram another run in, building our loadouts, and both griefing and being griefed.
We’d cycle through the competitive multiplayer playlists and queue into 24/7 Shipment like fools. The world was entirely a mess, but we knew we were living in the best of times with Call of Duty. But after this Beta, it feels like that moment with Call of Duty is over for my squad.
Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 will release on November 14th, 2025, on PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, and PC, free for Xbox Game Pass Ultimate subscribers.
