This week was a big one for Activision and all the studios that work on the popular Call of Duty franchise. At Gamescom, devs took to the stage of Opening Night Live to show off our first real look at Black Ops 7, the new main entry in the franchise. But due to various reasons, including hype for EA’s Battlefield 6 and fans feeling burned out, the vibes are all off, and for the first time in years, it feels like the Call of Duty empire is shaking.
Even before Black Ops 7‘s big gameplay reveal at Gamescom, the upcoming shooter was being targeted online by fans and critics who loved the Battlefield 6 open beta. Players, myself included, praised BF6‘s gritty combat, boots-on-the-ground action, sharp visuals, squad gameplay, and snappy shooting. For many players online, it felt like a return to the realistic military sims that once dominated the industry back in the early to mid aughts. I’m talkin’ games like Battlefield 3, Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter, and Rainbow Six Vegas.
BF6′s beta, its popularity, and the reaction to it led to former Blizzard president Mike Ybarra tweeting: “Battlefield [6] will boot stomp CoD this year. But the real win here is CoD won’t be lazy anymore, and we’ll all get better FPS games for it.” It didn’t help that during the BF6 beta, a Call of Duty rollercoaster gun went viral for all the wrong reasons. And before that, players were upset over expensive crossover skins, including American Dad and Beavis & Butthead cosmetics, that some felt were turning Black Ops 6 and Warzone into Fortnite, a game famous for its wild IP sandbox that features Goku, Batman, and more.
This all led to Tuesday, when Black Ops 7‘s first gameplay trailer premiered at Gamescom. It did so under a lot of scrutiny and in an atmosphere where even longtime vets of the series weren’t happy about the state of the game. So when the trailer showed off wild, trippy gameplay involving dream worlds and robots and strange sci-fi tech, it went over very, very poorly online. On Reddit, you can find fans saying they are done.
Another indicator that this new Black Ops 7 reveal isn’t landing with fans is how poorly it has been received on YouTube. The comments below the trailer are filled with players claiming they are going to pre-order BF6 instead and wondering what happened to Call of Duty. As reported by CharlieIntel, the Black Ops 7 reveal trailer has only around 36k likes. That makes it one of the least liked trailers in the franchise’s history.
Things only got worse when IGN asked Miles Leslie, associate creative director on the game, if Black Ops 7 was going to feature silly crossover skins. Leslie claimed that the devs were “always looking at community feedback” and then proceeded to offer up a nothingburger answer about trying to “calibrate” future skins based on “feedback” and making sure “all fans feel represented.” This answer didn’t go over well with players, especially when compared to the response given by BF6‘s design director Shashank Uchil when asked a similar question about cosmetics.
“It has to be grounded. That is what BF3 and BF4 was—it was all soldiers, on the ground,” said Uchil. “It’s going to be like this. I don’t think it needs Nicki Minaj. Let’s keep it real, keep it grounded.”
It would be foolish to count Call of Duty out in 2025. The franchise is still incredibly popular, especially with people who aren’t online every day, posting on Reddit and Discord. In 2024, Black Ops 6 was still the best-selling premium video game of the year, and the overall franchise sold more games last year than any other series. I would be shocked if Battlefield 6 outsells Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 this holiday season. Still, it’s clear that the vibes are rotten with this year’s Call of Duty.
It feels like fans are getting burned out on back-to-back direct sequels (something the franchise avoided for nearly 20 years), expensive cosmetics, AI-produced slop, the series getting wackier and weirder, and a sense that the people making the games aren’t listening to the people playing the games. This isn’t entirely new. For as long as Call of Duty has been popular, people have been hating on it. But this year, grumpy fans and tired vets have Battlefield 6 to rally around, an FPS that feels like it was designed in a lab to recreate the experience of playing those old Xbox 360-era military shooters people loved so much. In a way, it almost feels like CoD fans are hoping for BF6 to punish Black Ops 7, and they seem willing to pay money to help kick Activision in the gut.
