The big Black Ops 7 media blowout has officially begun, kicking off, of course with last night’s gamescom Opening Night Live reveal. The trailer coincided with the release of plenty of new information covering many aspects of the game, with the promise of more to come.
There are, however, several new and returning features well worth diving into.
For one, Carry Forward, the feature that allows you to bring some of the content from last year’s game into the new one, is coming back. Just like with Modern Warfare 2 to Modern Warfare 3 in 2023 – when the feature was first introduced, Black Ops 7 is doing the same with Black Ops 6’s content.
Weapons, operators, XP tokens, GobbleGums (Zombies), skins and other cosmetic items from last year’s game will be usable in Black Ops 7’s multiplayer, as well as Warzone. This will kick off a few weeks post launch, with the start of Season One.
There are, of course, some exceptions. You won’t be able to use skins for equipment and Scorestreaks that don’t exist, or work differently, in the new game. Weapon camos will carry forward, but they’re only going to apply to BO6 weapons, not BO7’s.
The Black Ops 7 campaign, playable in up to four players in co-op, has its fair share of new innovations, too. We’ve covered the campaign’s Endgame, an open-ended co-op mission meant to be played multiple times that borrows from roguelites, RPGs, and extraction games.
But Treyarch is also introducing a new concept called Global Progression, which is something I am surprised took Call of Duty this long to implement. While we’ve been enjoying cross progression between multiplayer, co-op (Zombies etc.), and Warzone for years now, the campaign has always been left out of that.
In Black Ops 7, you earn XP as you play the campaign. What this means in practice is that you’ll be levelling up your weapon (even unlocking camos), and unlocking other challenges that transfer over to multiplayer, Zombies, and Warzone.
In a blog post, Treyarch specifically named weapon Prestige (which is also coming back with BO7), standard weapon progression, camos, Calling Cards, daily challenges and much of the progression side of things.
Further building on that ethos of connected progression, Black Ops 7 is introducing the ability to share your Gunsmith weapon builds. These can be saved and sent directly to friends, but you can even generate a code for your build so anyone else can immediately use it without having to replicate it piece-by-piece.
More on the multiplayer side of things will be revealed on September 30 at Call of Duty: Next. The game’s beta will begin shortly after, running October 2-8. The full game arrives November 14 on PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S.