In 2025, most modern multiplayer shooters look like shitposts festering from the brain rot of a video game fan who has never logged off. Goku’s graced the Fortnite battle bus. You can run around with Nerf guns in Overwatch 2. Beavis and Butthead can shoot you with a pizza launcher in Call of Duty. The branded crossover situation has gotten bad enough that developers of upcoming shooters are promising they’ll cut out the nonsense — and the most recent mea culpa hails from none other than the developers behind Call of Duty: Black Ops 7.
“We know there’s been a lot of conversation recently about the identity of Call of Duty,” reads a blog post on the official Call of Duty website. “Some of you have said we’ve drifted from what made Call of Duty unique in the first place: immersive, intense, visceral and in many ways grounded. That feedback hits home, and we take it seriously. We hear you.”
A couple of weeks ago, Battlefield 6 made headlines after a developer seemingly took shots at the Call of Duty franchise by noting that DICE’s upcoming game wouldn’t have branded tie-ins. Instead, Battlefield 6 was aiming for “gritty realism” that was “grounded,” the developer said, adding that “I don’t think it needs Nicki Minaj.” As fans know, the boisterous pink-haired rapper was added to Modern Warfare 2 in 2023, and while much of the reception was positive at the time, the crossover has become a shorthand for the Call of Duty’s identity.
Over time, the once-serious and somber Call of Duty series has increasingly become a ridiculous repository of pop culture franchises like American Dad and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Arguably, Call of Duty’s no more egregious than its contemporaries. By itself, Fortnite‘s collaborations likely dwarf the number of tie-ins of all other multiplayer shooters combined, and the number grows every week. But Fortnite‘s cartoonish style and playful tone lend themselves more easily to silly skins, and much of the battle royale’s cultural cachet stems from those collaborations. Call of Duty’s shift toward hyper metaverse inclusion hasn’t been welcomed by fans with nearly as much enthusiasm.
“Future games need to calm down on the skins as its gotten ridiculous now,” reads one thread penned on Reddit a year ago. “The Call of Duty Skin Situation is Crazy…” declares a 2024 YouTube video. “CoD has lost faith in itself,” an opinion piece on a gaming website Dexerto says in reference to the game’s Squid Game collaboration.
Battlefield’s rejection of goofy aesthetics did kick off a bunch of renewed discourse on the state of Call of Duty, especially with a new entry on the horizon. That chatter, much of it negative, has apparently gotten through to the people making Call of Duty: Black Ops 7.
“Black Ops 7 needs to feel authentic to Call of Duty and its setting,” the blog post continues. “That is why Black Ops 6 Operator and Weapon content will not carry forward to Black Ops 7.”
Specific currencies and tokens will still work in the upcoming game, but otherwise, Call of Duty’s creators are hinting that they’ll lay off the ridiculous crossovers. It’s a curious move amid wider industry trends, especially when you consider that, for all the headlines, Battlefield as a series hasn’t been a sanctity of purity either. In the last year alone, Battlefield 2042 has integrated collaborations with other EA franchises like Mass Effect and Dead Space for example. These collaborations make sense inasmuch as they are properties owned by the same company (EA), and they’re nowhere near as immersion-breaking as, say, witnessing Peter Griffin hit the griddy over your dead body.
But for all the complaints levied by hardcore fans online, I can’t imagine that the fans who have spent money on these cosmetics will be thrilled at the prospect that those investments will vanish into the ether in a couple of months. And while it’s easy to reduce Call of Duty’s problems to the most visible ones — skins — without notable gameplay shifts, eschewing wacky cosmetics can only address the series’ most superficial issues. In a bigger picture sense, Call of Duty is still a series caught in a cycle of trying to recapture its former glory, and that’s true whether Beavis and Butthead are sullying your lobby or not.
All the same, Battlefield’s been on a PR roll in recent weeks between a bustling beta and open communication with fans that has made it clear that the developers are taking feedback seriously. The goodwill generated by these actions has been strong enough that Call of Duty has been caught in the crossfire as fans hype up Battlefield 6. Just last week, the Black Ops 7 reveal was marred on YouTube as the most upvoted comment on the trailer claimed “this actually made me pre-order Battlefield 6.”
Continued criticisms have also been levied at the similarities between Battlefield 6‘s twitch movement and the fast-paced gameplay that Call of Duty is known for, to the degree that EA has promised to tune the game away from frantic play styles. Through it all, the undercurrent has consistently given the appearance that audiences are growing weary of Call of Duty’s overall direction. It makes sense that the people making Call of Duty might feel some pressure to respond to this state of affairs rather than passively continuing to be the internet’s punching bag.
“A ton of feedback has already gone into Black Ops 7, and in the coming weeks you’ll hear much more directly from Treyarch,” the post reads.
Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 will be released on Nov. 14 on PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Windows PC, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X.
