Without a shadow of a doubt, Call of Duty is primarily a multiplayer game. Following the meteoric rise of the original Modern Warfare’s PvP, the series has become an industry behemoth, and its success is entirely down to its online modes. And yet, year after year, Activision has dedicated a significant amount of cash to funding elaborate single-player campaigns. As someone who grew up on the likes of Half-Life and Halo, these campaigns are the reason I’ve come back to Call of Duty year in, year out. Sure, it’s been a rocky relationship, but it’s been worth enduring for the really good ones – like last year’s fantastically orchestrated Black Ops 6, with its conveyor belt of exciting mission concepts.
But this year is different. Black Ops 7 specifically brands its story mode as a “co-op campaign,” and has been designed around a four-person squad. As our review points out, it is a significantly worse experience solo, to the point we could never recommend playing it alone. And so the entire Call of Duty package this year is multiplayer, a fact that has me wondering about the future of the series. Has it finally given in to the writing on the wall? Is COD single-player over?
Co-op support does not always spell the death of solo play. Halo and Gears of War have both built legacies on campaigns that support both equally. But in Black Ops 7, developers Raven Software and Treyarch haven’t made a classic Call of Duty campaign that can be played with a couple of buddies. The mission structure is fundamentally different from the series’ traditional template. There are none of the scripted cinematic moments that have defined Call of Duty’s reputation, nor the experimental concepts that characterised last year’s campaign. Instead, the entire mission pool is geared around simplistic corridor shooting and bullet sponge boss fights – scenarios that are easy to orchestrate with multiple players who are potentially more interested in chatting than engaging with a plotline. Perhaps understandably, trying to support multiple players across something as delicately railroaded as Modern Warfare’s iconic stealth affair, All Ghillied Up, or as attention-dependent as last year’s social espionage-flavoured Most Wanted, was considered a flight of fancy.
As a result, a great deal of Call of Duty’s foundational campaign DNA has been replaced. And by that I don’t just mean the addition of online infrastructure that eliminates the series’ atmospherically vital AI-controlled squadmate characters, and enforces no pausing and being kicked after a period of inactivity. No, I mean the introduction of enemy types with healthbars and, in the case of the new Endgame mode that caps off the story, damage numbers. The arrival of colour-coded, tiered weaponry that’s found in boxes, not on corpses, effectively turns guns into loot, and the open-world Avalon, frequently visited across the campaign before becoming your home for the Endgame, is peppered with small-scale objectives and activities, akin to Warzone’s battle royale map. Or a Destiny planet. Or a Helldivers world.
In fact, while there are 11 missions that lead into it, Endgame feels like the actual “point” of this campaign, more so than story, characters, or level concepts. This 32-player PvE mode will be supported throughout Black Ops 7’s lifetime, essentially turning it into an evolving, not-quite-live-service mode… one that, eventually, will be completely divorced from its original campaign packaging. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Activision already has plans to allow players to skip the missions entirely and get straight into Avalon. In a recent conversation with IGN, Black Ops 7’s associate creative director, Miles Leslie, revealed that on “day one, we want to make sure that people progress into [Endgame] naturally. We want them to get through that story, understand the world, the abilities, the characters. [But] what we've talked about is, at some point, and we haven't figured out just yet, when does it unlock it for everyone?”
It’s clear that Black Ops 7 is a new breed of Call of Duty campaign, one foremost designed around co-op multiplayer trends, rather than simply inviting other players to be involved in a traditional narrative shooter. From my perspective, it’s a much less interesting direction, but it’s undoubtedly a sign of the times. Just five percent of PlayStation players have unlocked the PS5 campaign completion trophy of last year’s Black Ops 6, and that only rises to eight percent if you go back to 2022’s Modern Warfare 2. Rewind even as far as 2019’s Modern Warfare reboot, arguably the last one that was universally agreed to be a must-play, and just 12.6% have the competition trophy. These stats clearly show that the vast majority of Call of Duty’s audience simply isn’t interested in playing alone, even for just the handful of hours required to clear these short campaigns. And with the budgets demanded, no wonder Activision has been investigating other, more multiplayer-focused alternatives… and no wonder it’s landed on something that feels like a mish-mash of Destiny, Borderlands, Left 4 Dead, and Warzone – games that have secured millions of players over the years, and broadly speak to “modern” tastes that have been more widely engineered by the likes of the always online, always social Fortnite.
Of course, this isn’t the first time that Call of Duty has attempted to go all-in on multiplayer. In fact, it’s been something of interest for Black Ops studio Treyarch for almost its entire COD career, starting with 2008’s World at War, where the campaign had (somewhat tacked-on) co-op support. A few years later, the studio would make a bolder effort with Black Ops 3, but that came with its own mistakes – a series of missions designed to be played in any order you wanted, akin to choosing multiplayer maps, meant the story lacked propulsion, coherence, and meaning. For its next game, it chose to scrap the campaign entirely, redirecting single-player resources towards Blackout, Call of Duty’s first stab at battle royale. This made Black Ops 4 the first and so far only purely multiplayer Call of Duty package – one I’m doubtful Activision will ever return to, but something that I think did signal inevitable shifts in development priorities.
We can see the colossal influence of multiplayer in other aspects of Call of Duty’s campaign design, too. 2023’s disastrous Modern Warfare 3 didn’t have co-op, but it did fully lean into the sensibilities of battle royale, tooling many of its missions to allow for the type of gameplay that those trained on Warzone would instinctively use. That went as far as even using whole sections of the Verdansk map as locations within the campaign, an idea Black Ops 7 has since pilfered with its use of Black Ops 6’s Skyline multiplayer map in the tail end of its campaign.
The infamously squashed development timeframe of Modern Warfare 3 is likely the most significant factor to blame for its “multiplayer recycled as single-player” feel, but I think there’s more to it. It wasn’t just that battle royale assets were there and ready to be Frankensteined together… it was also that Warzone was colossally more popular and more widely understood than the old-fashioned story campaign. And you can see that thinking in Black Ops 7, albeit from a new angle. Its campaign is designed around the interactions of a multiplayer shooter, not a cinematic story, and the result of that is a mode you can technically play alone, but one where the structure and balancing simply don’t make sense for it. And so, for the first time since Black Ops 4, Call of Duty is arguably a multiplayer game in its entirety.
But is this the future of Call of Duty? Will traditional campaigns be replaced by roughly-story-shaped co-op modes? It’s impossible to tell, since the series zigs and zags with yearly frequency. 12 months ago, we were given Call of Duty’s most ambitious take on its traditional single-player template since 2017’s Infinite Warfare, and yet the very same developers who made Black Ops 6 created this year’s wild left turn. In 2026, we’ll presumably get Infinity Ward’s next project, which could just as easily be a re-try of Modern Warfare 3’s Warzone-tinted experiment as much as it could be an emulation of the 2019 MW reboot or something else entirely. But as much as the future is impossible to see, the present paints a clear picture: Activision is assessing what Call of Duty means for the modern generation.
For years now, Call of Duty has been a trifecta of single-player, multiplayer, and co-op, expressed through its campaign, online, and zombies/spec-ops modes. And when you see the resources that went into Black Ops 6’s spectacular campaign, only for it to be completed by barely anyone who bought it, you have to be amazed at (and even respect) Activision’s historic dedication to big-budget single-player. But returns can only diminish for so long. The triple-A campaign shooter is an endangered species, with barely a Doom or a Wolfenstein to bank on regularly, and often, Call of Duty is the only one of its kind to arrive each year. It’s clear that Activision knows the era of the narrative FPS is practically over, and that it’s spending money on something barely any of its mammoth audience wants. And so things change. That started with multiplayer elements repackaged as single-player content, and it’ll very likely go much further than campaigns reimagined as multiplayer – you can now play Call of Duty entirely in third person, just in case you thought some things were invulnerable to the influence of Fortnite and Sony’s first-party titans.
While significant, permanent change may not come next year, or even the year after, I think this year’s campaign is a sign of things to come. At this point, when Call of Duty is a Game Pass tentpole and needs to demand engagement month after month to spin up never-ending subscriptions, why wouldn’t you turn your formerly five-hour-and-forget campaigns into a mini Destiny?
Matt Purslow is IGN's Executive Editor of Features.
