Black Ops 7 Brings Back a Controversial Advanced Warfare Feature

Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 will feature a controversial feature from Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare. The Call of Duty franchise has had many ups and downs. After having a new game every single year for about two decades, you’re bound to put out some games that people don’t like, whether they’re actually good or not. Perhaps the most divisive era of the entire Call of Duty franchise was in the mid-2010s. After hearing enough people say that Call of Duty was growing stale and doing too much of the same stuff over and over again, the series moved in a radical direction by going to the future, leading to massive changes to how the game plays.

Characters were equipped with jetpack-like technology that allowed them to run on walls, jump on to rooftops, and dash around with ease. However, this quickly became very divisive and players felt it was too far removed from Call of Duty’s true identity, prompting players to demand a return to boots on the ground gameplay. They got their wish with 2017’s Call of Duty: WWII and the series hasn’t returned to that era since then. However, Black Ops 7 is dipping its toe back into the future.

Black Ops 7 Will Have Jetpack-like Equipment in the Campaign

The new game from Treyarch doesn’t have wall-running and is still aiming to keep things fairly grounded, according to Treyarch. However, as you may have seen in some advertising for the game, Black Ops 7 is set in the future. The new game is a direct sequel to Black Ops 2 and takes place in 2035, a decade after the events of the aforementioned shooter. In the campaign, you will be able to use an optional and equippable ability called Mega Jump. This allows the player to jump extremely high, almost identically to the exo suit from Advanced Warfare. Without context, fans saw this in the trailer and began to fear the series was making that a major mechanic.

However, it appears to be kept largely to the campaign and Black Ops 7‘s PvE Endgame mode, which serves as an extension of the campaign. In multiplayer, Black Ops 7 will have something known as wall jumping. This allows you to boost yourself off of a wall to either cross gaps in the map or get out of danger. It’s sort of threading the needle between grounded gameplay and the advanced gameplay of previous games like Black Ops 3. Part of the reason for this is because Black Ops 3 is further into the future in the timeline of the games. As a result, Treyarch argues that it wouldn’t really make sense for soldiers to be wall-running quite yet.

So, don’t panic too much about the movement. It seems to be finding a middle ground in the multiplayer, but the campaign is clearly getting a bit more ambitious with things. It’s unclear if the Call of Duty series will ever fully return to the advanced movement of the futuristic games. Maybe the reception to Black Ops 7 will dictate where they go next, but we’ll just have to wait and see.

Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 will get a beta in early October before releasing on November 14th for last-gen and current-gen platforms. Do you want to see advanced movement return? Let me know in the comments.

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