The long-awaited reveal trailer for Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War has arrived, with Activision announcing that the game will be out for PlayStation 4, Xbox One and PC on 13th November. It will also be out for PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X “in late 2020”, either at the launch of the game or as soon as the consoles are available.
There will be multiple versions of the game, with cross-gen bundles and next-gen upgrades. It’s all a bit muddled, so we’ve detailed this in another post:
Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War paid next-gen upgrades & cross-gen bundles explained
CODBOCW (probably pronounced ‘cod-bock-wuh’) is a direct sequel to Call of Duty: Black Ops, one of the defining games of the long-running shooter. It takes the series back to the Cold War (duh!) after delving into sci-fi futuristic settings for the last few Treyarch Call of Duty games, but picks things up in 1981 and the era of President Reagan, and with Raven leading the single player development.
We can expect the game to feature a globetrotting narrative going through East Berlin, Vietnam, Turkey, the Soviet KGB HQ and beyond. It has returning character Woods, Mason and Hudson hot on the heels of an antagonist known as Perseus, looking to destabilise the world and likely see it descend in the anarchy and war. This will see a shift to more spy thriller themes, with several Hitman-esque open world levels. For the first time you’ll be able to create your own character for single player.
The game trailer has been revealed through an in-game treasure hunt in Call of Duty: Warzone, with players diving into a modified version of the game, collect classified documents, get a key and follow a series of clues until they meet Woods and get a gun from him. It was all just a prelude to a trailer being played in-game with a transmission coming after around 20 minutes of people struggling to get onto servers in time and then going through the treasure hunt to kill time.
CODBOCW was teased last week with a video featuring real world archival footage, however, this trailer was soon pulled and replaced with a much shorter version of the trailer, reportedly done to remove footage of Tiananmen Square that had the original trailer banned in China. Ironically, despite the tagline “Know Your History”, Activision seemed doomed to end up in the Chinese government’s naughty books and hastily made the change globally.
Those pre-ordering the game will be getting some bonuses for other games in the Call of Duty franchise. Sergeant Frank Woods will be joining the Demon Dogs in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare multiplayer and the free-to-play Call of Duty: Warzone battle royale, which will continue independently from the main games.
More details of CODBOCW will seemingly come on 9th September, detailing the Treyarch designed multiplayer, co-op and what it means for Warzone. The game will support cross-play between generations and cross-progression through all modes.
via Eurogamer
gazzagb
13th Nov could also be the launch of PS5/XBX? Launch bundles would make sense
MrYd
So they’ve made a mess of the next-gen upgrade thing there then?
Digitally, you can get current and next-gen versions for PS or Xbox in 1 bundle.
Or get the PS4 version and pay to upgrade, but that option is being “evaluated” for the XBox
And physically, you can buy a PS4 version and pay to upgrade, but you can’t do that with the XBone.
And then there’s the PS5 disc that only includes the PS5 version, while the XSX version also includes the XBone version on the disc.
I guess MS won’t be allowing that paid upgrade while Sony will. I’d rather pay £10 for an upgrade than have to buy a whole new version or rely on backwards compatibility. Of course, MS will be dragging out their Smart Devilry thing, but it’s already looking like not everyone will be on board with that.
So it’s all confusing, but Sony are going in the right direction on forward compatibility by allowing upgrades for a reasonable price.
Stefan L
On the Xbox news post it states that you can upgrade from the standard version to the Cross-Gen version for $10. I think that’s the loophole, that there needs to be a digital SKU of the game that bridges generations and then you can pay. It might be that you’re limited to paying the difference.
Also, Activision are seemingly hiding their $10 next-gen price hike behind this.
MrYd
I was going by what it said at https://support.activision.com/black-ops-cold-war/articles/call-of-duty-black-ops-cold-war-editions-faq
It says “Xbox One upgrade to Xbox Series X through the Microsoft Store is currently being evaluated” for the “digital standard edition”. Maybe MS will allow that loophole.
But they really have made a complete mess of it all.
Stefan L
That FAQ has been updated to now say “Xbox One will have an option to upgrade to Xbox Series X through the Microsoft Store at launch.” which is in line with what was announced on Xbox.
Starman
People really need to direct their ire at Activision here. Microsoft tried to set the norm to be free upgrades, a very pro consumer move. Unfortunately the greed wins over all.
MrYd
It’d be more pro-consumer if they just gave the whole game away for free in the first place. But I assume you wouldn’t expect them to go that far, would you?
The greedy ones are the people who expect the next-gen updates to be free. Why should they be? All we’d get then is a PS5 or XSX update that works just like the Pro or One X updates. No taking advantage of any of the features the next-gen consoles offer.
With the Pro and One X, it was probably quite reasonable to expect that to be free. With the next-gen? Most people are probably happy to pay £5 or £10 for an update.
Sony seem to be happy to let that be an option, after not allowing it for the PS4 Pro.
MS seem to be concentrating on all those old games from the previous generations that will run on the Series X. Allowing paid upgrades doesn’t fit with that too well, so they don’t want to allow it. Except now, possibly, a new CoD game is big enough to force them to allow it.
Hopefully they’ll apply that to everyone else and not just Activision. Because if they don’t, the only way around it is a complicated mess like this, or the Control situation where you have to buy a whole new version of the game to get the upgrade.
Sony could get an easy win there by just saying “We don’t expect developers to put in all that extra work for free, but we don’t expect PS5 owners to have to buy a whole new version of the game. So here’s a standard PS5 upgrade option for a reasonable fixed price, with a set of minimum improvements”
Starman
Excuse me if I don’t think the likes of Activision and EA need a few more pounds for a copy & paste game that will just be using the high end pc assets and barely changes each year. I get you want Microsoft to be the bad guy here but arguing For higher prices is pretty comical. By your logic PC games should be far higher than console.
MrYd
Sure, Activision and EA can probably afford it. But what about smaller developers? Should they not be allowed to charge for upgrades just because a couple of massive companies can afford not to?
And hopefully the PS5/XSX versions will be more than just “high end pc assets”. There’s all that stuff they’ve been talking about with the SSD and the fancy audio and raytracing. If the next-gen versions are just the best assets they’ve got and run it in 4K, then charging for an upgrade is clearly greedy. But if it’s using all that other stuff, what’s wrong with paying for it, especially if it’s smaller developers that probably wouldn’t do it otherwise?
I get you want Microsoft to be the good guys here, but arguing that they’re all pro-consumer when they’re just desperately trying to remain relevant with a new machine that plays old games and charging for updates doesn’t really fit in with that strategy is, well, pretty comical.
If MS really are against paid upgrades (unless you’re big enough to be allowed?), then there’ll be a lot less of them. Maybe Pro and OneX updates will still be a thing, and the huge games that sell millions might get next-gen updates for free. But not the smaller games, not for a while anyway, if ever. We saw the mess it caused with Control a couple of weeks back. Can’t do a paid update, can’t afford to do it for free, so the loophole is a whole new cross-gen version with the update when it’s ready. And as it seems like that’s down to MS not allowing it, and that’s affecting other platforms as well, yeah, MS are the bad guys here.
Starman
If you think they’re going to bother developing better assets than the high end pc versions then you’re deluded. You’re forgetting how lazy the big devs are. Also copying my phrases just makes you look a twat.