We have T-minus three days until Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 releases. Players have been gnawing at the bars of their enclosure to get back into the fray since the beta ended over a month ago, so I'm sure it'll come as a relief to many.
But there's not just a new multiplayer and campaign for players to look forward to—this time, Treyarch is also introducing Endgame.
There's no Infinity Gauntlet, and Steve Rogers won't be jumping into action. Endgame in Black Ops 7 is something very different. Once you reach the end of the campaign, you unlock Endgame, a replayable multiplayer mode set in a huge map made up of locations from the campaign.
"Avalon is this massive space, and we want you and your friends to continue to come back here," design director at Treyarch, Kevin Drew, says in a Dev Talk video. "We wanted to continue the campaign in a replayable way."
Fighting alongside up to 31 other players, your mission in Endgame is to wade through escalating zones and complete changing assignments with your squad, and then extract before time's up to keep your progress.
"This map is really special," level design director Phil Tasker says. "The team's been working on it for a really long time. They've designed it to be a cohesive space, but it's absolutely massive. We have tons of places of interest from previous games. We have maps from Black Ops 2, Black Ops 4, and Black Ops 6. You might even find a little piece of Hazard from Black Ops 1."
We don't have any specifics on which maps from previous Black Ops games will be used, aside from Hazard, but we do know that not all of them will be one-for-one remakes. "Some you'll experience just as they were in slightly new ways, and then some of them served as inspiration for totally new spaces," Tasker continues.
Endgame's concept has intrigued me, and not just because I'm a fan of some of the OG Black Ops maps. If Treyarch manages to pull this off, it may be the first time in a very long time that I'm actually excited to finish a Call of Duty campaign, and that would be priceless.
