Call of Duty Abandons Single-Player in Black Ops 7?

There's no denying that Call of Duty is fundamentally a multiplayer experience. Ever since the explosive popularity of the original Modern Warfare's PvP mode, the franchise has grown into a gaming titan, with its success rooted squarely in its online offerings. Still, Activision continues to invest heavily in crafting high-production-value single-player campaigns each year. As someone who grew up playing classics like Half-Life and Halo, these story-driven modes are precisely what bring me back to Call of Duty annually. Admittedly, the quality has been inconsistent, but enduring the weaker entries has been worthwhile for standout experiences like last year's masterfully executed Black Ops 6, which delivered a rapid-fire succession of inventive mission concepts.

This year, however, marks a departure. Black Ops 7 explicitly markets its narrative mode as a "co-op campaign," built from the ground up for four-player squads. As noted in our review, playing it solo is a notably inferior experience—so much so that we cannot recommend it for lone wolves. Consequently, the entire Call of Duty package this year is multiplayer-focused, leaving me to ponder the series' trajectory. Has it finally acknowledged the inevitable? Is the era of COD single-player coming to a close?

Incorporating co-op doesn't inherently mean sacrificing solo play. Franchises like Halo and Gears of War have legendary campaigns that work seamlessly both alone and with friends. However, with Black Ops 7, developers Raven Software and Treyarch haven't simply taken a classic Call of Duty campaign and added cooperative support. The mission design is fundamentally different from the series' established formula. Gone are the scripted cinematic sequences that cemented Call of Duty's reputation, as well as the experimental concepts that defined last year's installment. Instead, the mission roster focuses on straightforward corridor shooting and bullet-sponge boss encounters—scenarios that are easier to manage with multiple players who might be more focused on socializing than following a story. It's understandable that attempting to support multiple players in meticulously crafted missions like Modern Warfare's iconic stealth level, All Ghillied Up, or last year's attention-intensive social espionage mission, Most Wanted, was likely deemed impractical.

As a result, core elements of the traditional Call of Duty campaign have been removed. I'm not just referring to the always-online requirement, which eliminates the atmospheric presence of AI squadmates and prohibits pausing, leading to disconnection after inactivity. More significantly, we now see enemy types with health bars and, in the new Endgame mode that concludes the story, damage numbers. The introduction of color-coded, tiered weapons found in loot boxes rather than on defeated enemies essentially turns guns into collectible items. Meanwhile, the open-world setting of Avalon, visited repeatedly during the campaign before serving as the Endgame hub, is filled with minor objectives and activities reminiscent of Warzone's battle royale map—or perhaps a Destiny planet or a Helldivers world.

In fact, while there are 11 story missions leading up to it, Endgame feels like the true focus of this campaign, surpassing narrative, characters, or level design in importance. This 32-player PvE mode will receive ongoing support throughout Black Ops 7's lifecycle, evolving into a quasi-live-service experience that may eventually become entirely detached from its original campaign context. Unsurprisingly, Activision is already considering allowing players to skip the story missions entirely and jump straight into Avalon. In a recent discussion with IGN, Black Ops 7 Associate Creative Director Miles Leslie mentioned that initially, the team wants players to "progress into [Endgame] naturally. We want them to experience the story, understand the world, the abilities, the characters. [But] we've discussed potentially unlocking it for everyone at some point—we just haven't decided when."

A mere 5% of PlayStation players unlocked the campaign completion trophy for last year's Black Ops 6.

It's evident that Black Ops 7 represents a new type of Call of Duty campaign, one primarily shaped by co-op multiplayer trends rather than merely allowing additional players into a traditional narrative shooter. From my viewpoint, this is a less compelling direction, but it undoubtedly reflects current industry patterns. Only five percent of PlayStation players earned the PS5 campaign completion trophy for last year's Black Ops 6, a figure that only rises to eight percent for 2022's Modern Warfare 2. Looking back to 2019's Modern Warfare reboot—arguably the last universally acclaimed must-play campaign—just 12.6% obtained the completion trophy. These statistics clearly indicate that the vast majority of Call of Duty's audience has little interest in playing alone, even for the few hours required to complete these brief campaigns. Given the substantial budgets involved, it's no surprise that Activision is exploring more multiplayer-centric alternatives... and it's equally unsurprising that they've arrived at a blend reminiscent of Destiny, Borderlands, Left 4 Dead, and Warzone—games that have attracted millions of players over the years and align with "modern" gaming tastes largely shaped by always-online, socially driven experiences like Fortnite.

This isn't Call of Duty's first attempt to go all-in on multiplayer. In fact, Black Ops developer Treyarch has shown interest in this approach for most of its COD tenure, beginning with 2008's World at War, which featured (somewhat superficially added) co-op support in its campaign. Several years later, the studio took a bolder step with Black Ops 3, though this came with its own missteps—missions designed to be played in any order, similar to selecting multiplayer maps, resulted in a story that lacked momentum, coherence, and meaning. For its subsequent release, Treyarch decided to eliminate the campaign entirely, redirecting single-player resources toward Blackout, Call of Duty's inaugural battle royale mode. This made Black Ops 4 the first and, to date, only purely multiplayer Call of Duty package—an approach I doubt Activision will revisit, but one that signaled inevitable shifts in development priorities.

The massive influence of multiplayer is apparent in other aspects of Call of Duty's campaign design as well. 2023's poorly received Modern Warfare 3 didn't include co-op but fully embraced battle royale mechanics, designing many missions around the gameplay instincts honed by Warzone veterans. This included repurposing large sections of the Verdansk map as campaign locations—a concept Black Ops 7 has since adopted by incorporating Black Ops 6's Skyline multiplayer map toward the end of its story.

The notoriously compressed development cycle of Modern Warfare 3 is probably the primary reason for its "repackaged multiplayer as single-player" feel, but I believe there's more to it. Not only were battle royale assets readily available for reassembly, but Warzone was also dramatically more popular and widely understood than traditional story campaigns. This same thinking is evident in Black Ops 7, albeit from a different perspective. Its campaign is built around multiplayer shooter interactions rather than cinematic storytelling, resulting in a mode you can technically play solo, but whose structure and balance simply don't support it. Thus, for the first time since Black Ops 4, Call of Duty can arguably be considered an entirely multiplayer game.

But is this the future of Call of Duty? Will traditional campaigns be replaced by vaguely narrative co-op modes? It's impossible to predict, as the series frequently changes direction year to year. Just twelve months ago, we received the most ambitious take on the traditional single-player formula since 2017's Infinite Warfare. Yet the same developers behind Black Ops 6 have taken a sharp turn this year. In 2026, we'll presumably see Infinity Ward's next project, which could just as easily revisit Modern Warfare 3's Warzone-inspired experiment as emulate the 2019 MW reboot or try something completely different. While the future remains unclear, the present situation is telling: Activision is reevaluating what Call of Duty represents for today's gaming generation.

For years, Call of Duty has presented a three-part package: single-player, multiplayer, and co-op, delivered through its campaign, online modes, and zombies/spec-ops offerings. When you consider the resources poured into Black Ops 6's spectacular campaign, only to see it completed by a tiny fraction of purchasers, Activision's historical commitment to big-budget single-player is both astonishing and somewhat admirable. However, diminishing returns can only be sustained for so long. The AAA campaign shooter has become an endangered species, with few reliable franchises like Doom or Wolfenstein remaining, and often Call of Duty stands alone as the only major annual release in this category. It's clear that Activision recognizes the narrative FPS era is effectively over, and that it's investing in something its massive audience largely ignores. Thus, evolution is inevitable. This transition began with multiplayer elements being repackaged as single-player content, and it will likely extend far beyond campaigns reimagined as multiplayer—you can now play Call of Duty entirely in third-person view, proving that even foundational elements aren't immune to the influence of Fortnite and Sony's first-party giants.

While major, permanent changes might not arrive next year or even the year after, this year's campaign feels like a harbinger of what's to come. At a time when Call of Duty serves as a Game Pass cornerstone and must maintain monthly engagement to support recurring subscriptions, why wouldn't you transform your previously five-hour disposable campaigns into a miniature Destiny-like experience?