INTERVIEW: "We wanted to do something that was absolutely unique," — Treyarch Studios embraces the madness of Call of Duty: Black Ops 7

Earlier this month, I stepped off a shuttle bus and shuffled through the doors of Treyarch Studios with a small horde of fellow game journalists. This wasn’t my first trip to Treyarch’s newest office, as I had visited it just a year prior to interview Yale Miller and Matt Scronce ahead of the reveal of Black Ops 6.

A lot had changed since my previous visit, however.

The lobby sported a few new trophies in the display cases, and a plush Mister Peaks — the unsettling plush bunny that became a mascot for Black Ops 6’s Zombies mode — was now sitting among the wonder weapon and mystery box replicas. The previously revealed teaser trailer for Black Ops 7 was playing on the wall-mounted TVs.

The lobby gives way to an area called the Pit, which had been newly redecorated since my last visit. Abby, the giant zombie abomination that delighted many at COD NEXT in 2024, now also lives permanently in Treyarch. New murals featuring David “Section” Mason and Emma Kagan overlooked the cubicles of testing stations.

From there, we move on to the theater, a blacked-out room with strip lighting set to blue and a bank of theater seats. A couple of screens feature the Black Ops 7 cover art, with David Mason awash in blue and orange hues. We sit through a rehearsed briefing, with various team members from Treyarch and Raven Software excitedly switching out with the next after telling us a little about what they’ve been working on.

“There’s a lot of love in the studio” for Black Ops, says Yale Miller, Director of Production for Treyarch, during a group interview session, “Part of the thing for making great games is finding out what the team is really passionate about.”

It’s clear from listening to the team speak about Black Ops that they’re passionate about the franchise. It’s hard not to smile when a member of the art team is excitedly pointing out the latest in GPU particle effects, and what this jump in the graphics tech means for the game’s creepy new fog-covered zombies maps.

Staying true to Black Ops while crafting something new

Call of Duty is frequently maligned as being an annual reskin of the same game, despite the differences between the franchises. That allegation is only made worse when Activision and the Call of Duty studios behind the game attempt to develop and release a sequel in tandem — as we previously saw with Modern Warfare 2 and 3 in 2022 and 2023.

Accusations that the tandem sequel is little more than an “expansion” run rampant. There were murmurs of such a situation surrounding the first-ever back-to-back sequel launch in the Black Ops series, but they were seemingly quieted by the previously released teaser trailer that set Black Ops 7 apart from its predecessor fairly quickly.

“We wanted to do something that was absolutely unique from Black Ops 6,” says Miller.

Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 was a story split across two timelines, providing the perfect playground for a story that could be split between two games and still feel cohesive as sequels. In Black Ops 2, we saw the first half of the campaign as Frank Woods and Alex Mason in the 80s. Then, in the Black Ops’ version of the year 2025, the player becomes Alex’s son, David “Section” Mason.

For Black Ops 6, Raven Software collaborated with Treyarch to dive deeper into Frank Woods’ actions in the 90s. In Black Ops 7, the team continued to pull the thread from Black Ops 2 to David Mason’s story, crafting a futuristic new story in a not-too-modern timeline that gave them some wiggle room to explore with new tech and gameplay.

“Where could you go, right?” Miller asks, “We’ve done past, we’ve done future. We started looking at having meetings, talking about “What are the things that we want to push on? We want to kind of embrace madness and push a little bit further.”

“We talk a lot about ‘what's the DNA of Black Ops’,” Miller continued, “We kept coming back [to 2035]. What are the new stories that we could tell there? Everyone was vibing on near future because it allows us to play with gear and gadgets, and all the other stuff. Then it was like, ‘Oh, that’s getting really close to Black Ops 2!’ Well, it’s canon for us.”

Miller goes on to describe how the team settled on the 10-year gap between Black Ops 2’s 2025 setting and Black Ops 7’s 2035 timeline. He says that it felt good to the team to tell a new story while also addressing the effects of the actions taken in previous games.

Developing Black Ops 6 and Black Ops 7 in tandem gave the team a unique opportunity to craft to very distinct stories that were threaded together. “We can push on ideas, content, and experiences that you just can’t do in 1990.”

“They were greenlit at the same time,” says Matt Scronce, “We knew from the start that Black Ops 6 and Black Ops 7, that this would be how it was. [With Black Ops 6] The team gets to dig their teeth into a 90s game, which we had never done, but then right off the back of that — along with our partners — we get to go to the near future.”

“If I’m thinking about gameplay content, active camo is not something we could have done in Black Ops 6, right?” continues Scronce, “Like, we’re Black Ops so we probably could have found a way to make it make sense, but that’s a very specific example of a piece of content we just — narratively and fictionally — we couldn’t and probably wouldn’t do.

“In Black Ops 7, being able to flex into that near future and just kind of breaking the chains off of having to be bound by historical pieces of content or reality, and kind of being able to be a bit more creative when it comes to some of the tech has been a ton of fun,” says Scronce.

With Black Ops 7’s push back into the future, I couldn’t help but wonder if the Black Ops franchise could possibly be creeping toward a finale, but Miller was quick to dissuade such a notion, “It can’t be [the end] for us because we have so much love for our other games. Like Black Ops 3 is canon, right? There are still things that are there [to explore].”

“We have huge moments, with the passing of Woods,” Miller continues, bringing up a moment shown in the latest Black Ops 7 trailer when we see Frank Woods’ headstone, “That’s a character that in our current world, no longer exists. So some of those things are tough for the team…but I don’t think we’re thinking of this as any kind of finality.

You go into the future anyway with Black Ops 4 and Black Ops 3, so it would be impossible unless we find some way to sever the timeline. But we’re not making the game.”

Balancing content plans for Black Ops 7’s future

Treyarch and Raven team members’ spoke during our briefing about the seven pillars of Black Ops 7’s gameplay — from the brand-new campaign endgame experience down to the co-op of Dead Ops Arcade 4, but Call of Duty doesn’t just stop with its day one launch. Each game receives a year of post-launch support content, including new maps and modes for multiplayer, new weapons and operators, and so much more.

With seven distinct gameplay modes to address, each with its own unlockable content, there is a lot of wiggle room for filling out those roadmap cards released each season. That doesn’t mean content planning is easy, though. “It’s actually extremely hard to balance everything across all of the modes,” says Treyarch’s design director, Matt Scronce.

“We do our best,” Miller adds.

Scronce echoes the “We do our best” sentiment, with Miller adding, “I’m sure the community will let us know when they’re not perfectly balanced.”

“But we have an amazing systems design team here who are deep in the spreadsheets across all the modes,” Scronce adds.

Speaking of Black Ops 7’s seven pillars, Scronce continues, “It was super exciting for us when we had the vision, and it came to the realization [that] you can play this entire game with your friends or by yourself. Every time you go and play, whether it's core multiplayer, it's skirmish, it’s co-op campaign. Dead-ops, or Zombies. You’re always going to be earning towards a camo or battle pass, so that’s the exciting bit. You can stick to one mode, but there’s a whole lot more game to see out there.”

While co-op is back for Black Ops 7, we shouldn’t expect it to be the norm for every Call of Duty title going forward. “It’s what’s right for the game,” says Miller, “the big word is ‘connected’ when we talk about the experience and what makes this game unique.”

The team initially toyed with the idea of only adding two-player co-op to Black Ops 7, claiming it would have been easier for the team, according to Miller, “But then you can’t take your squad all the way through zombies!”

The decision to add co-op then left the campaign team wanting for a camo track. “Well, if it’s really a connected game, then you should be earning progression everywhere.”

This led to further connections, even in interesting ways that might otherwise grab your attention but make sense in context. “Connected perks,” Miller adds, “even the HUD where you’re actually seeing what your squad is doing. You can see that stuff already in military stuff, where [there is] clear information about what other players are doing.” Miller says the team pushed those real-world ideas forward and applied it to game systems for Black Ops 7.

Truly cooperative experience, but maybe a little surprise

With all the talk of connectivity and exploring the campaign as a cooperative experience, the chatter in our group turned to the newly announced endgame mode for Black Ops 7. Set in the world of Avalon, the newest of Black Ops 7’s seven pillars of gameplay is a “Player versus Environment” (or PvE) experience that turns players loose with wingsuits in four-person squads with up to 32 players per server.

“We’ve had that debate a lot,” Miller says with a chuckle when asked if the mode would be strictly PvE, “There could be a little surprise here,” adds Scronce.

“There are all kinds of activities and contracts and things that you can do,” says Miller. “The World of Avalon is broken up into different difficulty zones where certain areas are going to have much harder things to do, and you need to be more leveled up to go into those areas, or you will get annihilated.

Some of those activities, you can complete them on your own, or you can join up and complete them together with different squads. Certain activities and other things will require you to join up with a lot more players to be able to get through things,” Miller continued.

While many of the things we saw of the new Avalon map and Endgame’s cooperative experience resembled the DMZ and Modern Warzone Zombies experience we’ve had in the past, there is a bit of a twist. The server does not stay open indefinitely, and there is a time limit on how long you and your squad can remain in Avalon.

We unfortunately did not get a chance to see Avalon in action, but the team’s comments about the mode have me envisioning a love child between DMZ/MWZ and The Division’s “Survival” mode of days gone by.

Not every fan of a large-scale experience is vying for a cooperative one, however, and that’s where Skirmish comes in.

“It’s something that is not unfamiliar to us,” Scronce says of the new 20 vs 20 mode, “We did combined arms in Cold War, which we had a lot of fun with.

We’ve always kind of dabbled in ground war over the years in various capacities. 20v20 was kind of the most fun, really, when it came down to it. I talked about trying to hit the right kind of Black Ops pace for us where it's not too crazy, but also you’re not getting bored.”

“We’re still dialing some of that stuff,” says Miller. “But I think we’re in a good spot,” adds Scronce.

According to Miller, the team had to decide what was going to be part of the plan for Warzone, saying, “The last thing we want to do is just make another resurgence experience. How can it be unique and different? That leads to the different squad sizes.” On the decision to add in wingsuits, grapples, and armor? Scronce says, “That shit’s just fun!”

Black Ops 7 is ambitious, but still somehow last-gen friendly

While Miller and Scronce talk about all the connectivity of Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 and the title’s ever expanding “pillars of gameplay”, it seems inevitable that some of these new features will be left on the cutting room floor in order to push through launch. We saw this with Call of Duty: Black Ops 6, when theater mode was unceremoniously removed from the release on last-gen consoles. Surely some of Black Ops 7’s seven pillars won’t make it to the PS4 and Xbox One?

“There is some stuff,” confirms Miller on the absence of features for last-gen, though he confirms that all the game’s core experiences will be there. “We put a lot of icing and hot sauce on stuff to just make it look as awesome as it possibly can. The horsepower on PS4, Xbox One, and …it’s the same thing on lower-end PC. We want people with a lower-end PC to still be able to play.

Our mini spec will go up a little bit — that’ll get announced sooner than later — but in general, the gameplay is the same, and you’ll be able to play cooperatively with everyone. You might have things like less particles, and you definitely have less reflection. Stuff you saw in Forge where you’re actually getting light bouncing across.”

Miller also adds that while no features, themselves, have been cut, the inclusion and support of Theater mode is an ongoing conversation. “Our goal for theater is to support it, but I don’t know where that will end.”

However, players with current-gen consoles and higher-end PCs can look forward to more of that ‘icing and hot sauce.’ “Full ray tracing, path tracing. We can also push more stuff with just like particle density, antialiasing, things like that,” Miller concluded.

Generative AI imagery and Black Ops

While we were discussing the game’s art, it felt like a good time to ask Scronce and Miller about the future of generative AI in Black Ops. Black Ops 6 came under considerable fire for its use of generative AI in event rewards and as part of bundles. To the point that Steam’s policy on disclosing the use of AI in games led to Activision confirming its reliance on the nascent tech.

Miller jumps in to quickly reiterate that “All of our stuff is touched by people” when I bring up the topic of generative AI. He dances around the topic like a pro, but his body language makes it clear this isn’t really a topic of discussion he wants to linger on.

“Obviously, teams have looked at different things and different ways to use AI, but everything that you’re seeing today is all touched by people,” Miller reiterates.

He also adds, “AI is a tool, and we’re still figuring it out. I think everyone in the industry is figuring out how you can and should use it.”

Black Ops 7 seems unlikely to shed the generative AI disclosure on Steam, but at least the team has seemingly learned from past mistakes going forward.

Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 is developed by Treyarch and Raven Software and published by Activision. The game is expected to launch on November 14 on Xbox consoles, PlayStation consoles, and PC via Steam, Battle.net, and Xbox on PC. It will join Xbox Game Pass Ultimate and PC Game Pass libraries on day one.