Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 is set to launch this November. And, surprisingly, a decade after the PS4 and Xbox One’s launch, BLOPS 7 is still arriving day one on the aging machines. According to the devs making the next entry in Activision’s blockbuster franchise, the old consoles don’t force them to hold anything back, and Call of Duty is still played by a “shocking” amount of people on those platforms.
In a new interview with Dexerto, Treyarch’s senior director of production Yale Miller and associate design director Lawrence Metten addressed fan concerns that developing Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 for the now 13-year-old PS4 and Xbox One was holding the game back and limiting what the studio could do on PC and current-gen hardware. According to them, that’s not the case at all.
“The way we’ve talked about it always is, you should never be thinking about old-gen for the features that you’re designing,” Miller told the outlet.
Instead, the team builds the game for PS5, Xbox Series X/S, and PC, and then makes it work on the older machines. This sometimes leads to features not making it onto PS4 and Xbox One, a disappointing decision for last-gen players, but one that the studio is willing to make.
“[Theater mode in Black Ops 6 was] something that we knew we wanted to do,” said Metten. “We can’t support it on old-gen. That’s not a reason not to do the feature. We’re gonna bite the bullet and disable it on old-gen.”
Why Call of Duty is still launching on PS4 in 2025
As to why Activision is still developing Call of Duty games for the decade-old machines, the answer is obvious but still surprising: In 2025, there are still a lot of people playing these games on older consoles. Miller didn’t share specific numbers, but told Dexerto there is a “shocking number of people” playing new Call of Duty games on PS4 and Xbox One, and this apparently helps with matchmaking, giving them more players to work with.
“It made sense for us to [bring Black Ops 7 to last gen], and we could,” said Miler. “There are straight-up, like, graphical features and things that you just won’t see, but we feel like that doesn’t necessarily break the experience. And, obviously, there’s performance and other things that are not gonna be as good, but that’s it. It’s just players.”
While that makes sense, I can’t help but feel like it might be time to move on, especially as EA’s upcoming Battlefield 6 is doing that and cutting PS4 and Xbox One loose. However, while both are military shooters, they offer very different experiences and demand different things from the platforms they are available on.
Still, if CoD is so scalable and flexible, I do wonder why the team isn’t, as far as we know, working on a Switch 2 port of Black Ops 7. Perhaps they also struggled to get dev kits ahead of Nintendo’s console launch earlier this year? Or maybe somewhere deep inside the massive entity that is Activision-owned studios, someone is tinkering with Black Ops 7 on Switch 2 right now. I wouldn’t bet on it, but maybe you like to gamble?
