It seems the upcoming Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 will be moving away from the usual single-player campaign experiences that we’ve previously seen from the franchise in many ways as it won’t have any traditional difficulty settings at all, developer Treyarch has confirmed and instead the difficulty will scale according to how many players are playing it. So if you’re playing Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 only by yourself, it’ll have a vastly reduced difficulty than if you choose to play it with one or several friends.
“For the difficulty, it’s baked in,” associate creative director Miles Leslie has recently told IGN, “We’ve built it for solo or four-player squads as well. You cannot pick a difficulty like past games. We’ve baked it in because you have to approach a co-op campaign differently, and we wanted to make sure the missions felt right for solo players — we’re not forgetting about you, we love you — but also because it is a social experience we want to make sure it’s fun, but the right amount of challenging for two, three, and four players as well.”
While for a campaign that’s practically built around co-op playing, Call of Duty: Black Ops 7’s design choices do make a lot of sense but it can be argued that it could’ve been more tailored to the traditional experiences of modular difficulties when playing solo. This way, it could’ve catered to both solo players and players who want the proper co-op experience with multiple friends as for now it could be a bit divisive for players who are more accustomed to the usual single player FPS experience.
However, this could also mean the devs crafting a more balanced gameplay experience that can be immersive and enjoyable for a wide range of players, though it’s pretty difficult to actually come up with one setting that feels right for most players out there.
Black Ops 7 will also have an open beta free across all platforms, with players who pre-order or with a subscription to select Game Pass plans granted early access. The beta will run from October 5-8 for all gamers, with Early Access provided to players right from October 2.
Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 is set to release on November 14 across Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, PlayStation 5, PlayStation 4, and PC via Battle.net, Xbox on PC, and Steam.
