A boundless excitement for Battlefield 6 loomed large over Call of Duty's deflating Black Ops 7 reveal
This week: Got all sappy about the server browser and got very close to downloading Quake.
Activision did its big Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 reveal yesterday, and speaking as someone who plays these games a lot, I don't think anyone's heart is in it this year.
A trailer focused on its 2035 campaign that took center stage at Gamescom Opening Night Live had all the qualities of a $12 Subway sandwich—familiar, unappetizing, calorically adequate. The audience cheers in Germany were so modest that, if you listened closely, you could probably hear a crowd in front of the Seattle Microsoft campus protesting the CoD owner's dealings with the Israeli military.
An in-depth Black Ops 7 Direct video that showed off multiplayer had announcements that at least raised an eyebrow—you can Mario walljump off some walls now, which is different from wallrunning for, um, reasons—but its accompanying blog post read like a marketing team was tasked with making minor changes sound like a huge deal.
New features that warranted paragraphs of text include a somewhat futuristic UI, the deletion of tac sprint, and scorestreaks that level up. To some, those bright spots were overshadowed by the news that all the garish cosmetics from last year's game would return.
Yesterday's reveal felt different because, for the first time in years, Call of Duty was met with the level of cynicism that an annual franchise deserves. Treyarch's octagonal future aesthetic looks like it was arbitrarily chosen from a 'Call of Duty art" grab bag because it's been a while since Activision milked that particular cow. But this time, Treyarch's pitch of a nostalgic nod to a beloved era of the series isn't taking hold the same way it did a year ago.
Instead, it feels like Activision is grasping for ways to signal that Black Ops 7 is meaningfully different from Black Ops 6, but we've been on this ride before. We know what a "filler" CoD looks like because we just got one two years ago.
Enter Battlefield 6
What Call of Duty didn't have two years ago was a legitimate alternative. The three weeks leading up to the Black Ops 7 reveal were the Battlefield 6 show: A gameplay premiere that amounted to glowing impressions (and not just from easy-to-please influencers), a wildly successful beta, and a growing sentiment that Battlefield has finally caught up to Call of Duty where it matters most.
To bleary-eyed CoD fans, Battlefield 6 is shaping up to be everything Blops 7 isn't: Classic, bombastic, modern, and decidedly less ugly. Two days removed from the end of a beta that blew Call of Duty's recent Steam milestones out of the water, it's impossible to look at the reception to Blops 7 and not think Battlefield was a factor.
YouTube likes are an imperfect source of truth that over-indexes on haterade, but they're a decent vibe check: In 24 hours, the Blops 7 reveal trailer has 37k likes and over 169k dislikes on YouTube (you can still see the dislikes counter with a Chrome extension). If you scroll down to the comments, it's clear Battlefield 6 is on a lot of people's minds.
Last year's Black Ops 6 reveal is almost a perfect inverse: 161k likes and just 5k dislikes. With a three-week head start, the Battlefield 6 multiplayer reveal trailer is sitting at 288k likes and 1.2k dislikes.
Of course, Activision still has opportunities to show that Blops 7 is more than it appears to be. The extended multiplayer reveal is still over a month away, with the open beta starting October 2.
I'm sure the beta will be basically fun, but even that assurance highlights a difference between Battlefield 6 and Blops 7: When I first saw Battlefield 6 gameplay, I immediately wanted to know what playing it was like. When I look at Blops 7, I see no mysteries.