Black Ops 7’s Endgame Mode Explained: It’s Call of Duty’s 32-Player Rougelike RPG

Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 is taking a bold new direction with its campaign by offering an open-world RPG as its “endgame”. Call of Duty has stuck to a very specific formula for over a decade now. There’s a 6 – 8 hour campaign that is extremely cinematic and gets your feet wet with the mechanics of the game, a highly replayable co-op mode typically in the form of Zombies, and the PvP multiplayer. It’s a value-rich package that has something for everyone. Some people only play Zombies and don’t really engage with the rest of the game because it’s worth the price of admission on its own.

With that said, I recently went to Treyarch to preview Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 and the game sounds incredibly ambitious. The team is trying to make something that can be played entirely in co-op across every mode where you can also earn progression. Everything you do in the game, including campaign, earns you XP and rewards for multiplayer. In theory, you could prestige by just playing the campaign. While this would probably be a bit time consuming if you just ran the standard gauntlet of linear missions, this is more plausible with Call of Duty: Black Ops 7‘s new Endgame mode.

Call of Duty: Black Ops 7’s Endgame Mode Explained

In Black Ops 7, there are 11 campaign missions which make up a typical Call of Duty story. At the end of the 11th mission, you will roll credits and have a proper conclusion to the game’s campaign. However, there is almost an extended post-credits-esque mission that is basically its own mode known as Endgame. While they didn’t get into the specific plot details of Endgame, it will continue/extend the story of Black Ops 7 and is designed to be “never ending” with up to 32 players participating in it any given time.

You won’t specifically be locked playing as David Mason or his crew in this mode as you can play as any operator in the game, suggesting you can use whatever skin you desire. Endgame takes place on Avalon, a giant open-world map (that will almost certainly be the new Warzone map, but that’s pure speculation). Avalon is featured in the main campaign, though it will not be nearly as open as it is in Endgame. Design director Kevin Drew, who has worked on Zombies since Black Ops 4 and designed Cold War‘s Outbreak mode, talked about bringing the replayability found in Zombies to campaign.

“We really wanted to bring replayability to campaign in the way we have with Zombies,” said Drew. “A big part of that is we really want to open up progression for the entire game. What we’re really doing here is creating a new path for campaign players to continue experiencing our game and also ideally bring in other players who want to check out this open-world, never ending version of campaign.”

The campaign essentially prepares and trains you for Endgame, toughening you up for all of the things this new mode will throw at you. You’ll wingsuit into Avalon and participate in a new, undisclosed conflict and make your way around the map completing different objectives. They showed us the map of Avalon and it had a sort of Ubisoft-esque zoning system, all of which will eventually lead you to the final battle/objective. Certain areas had levels or tiers that indicated they may be harder than others and will require you to level up your character to be up for the task.

Drew noted that there’s a “power journey” that players will go on to conquer Endgame which requires several sessions to more or less to go after that last objective. You’ll be building your own loadouts, customizing different abilities such as a grappling hook and an Advanced Warfare-esque mega jump, and earning a combat rating that allow you to sort of flesh out a skill tree and increase things like your health. There are 60 combat rating levels, meaning there’s a pretty significant amount of progression in this mode.

However, if you die, you lose everything and have to start over from scratch. Drew mentioned something about “escaping” to ensure you keep your progress, suggesting there’s an extraction element to it all like Modern Warfare II‘s DMZ, but they didn’t really expand on that. Endgame is still being shrouded in some secrecy, as they didn’t share any notable gameplay from it, but hopefully, we’ll hear more about it prior to launch. It’s unclear if there will be cutscenes that happen as you progress through the mode or if that will be something that more or less bookends the journey you go on. Given you’re playing as your own operator and not an actual character, it’s hard to imagine this having the same storytelling depth as the core campaign.

However, it seems like Endgame is a crucial component of Black Ops 7. Treyarch didn’t reveal whether or not it plans to update Endgame in its post-launch support, but given its story has an ending already, it may not get any sort of major updates. I hope this has some depth to it and isn’t just a hollowed out PvE version of Warzone filled with boring objectives like capturing an area, clearing outposts, or looking for special loot. This could be a glorified version of DMZ, for better or worse, but it needs to have some depth to attract the kind of engagement that Treyarch seems to desire.

Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 releases on November 14th. What do you think of this new Endgame mode? Let me know in the comments.