Call of Duty Devs Admit Worry Over Back-to-Back Black Ops After 20 Years — Bold Gamble or Big Mistake?

Call of Duty has been around long enough to trigger muscle memory just by booting it up. And now the people making it are saying the quiet part out loud: they worry the next one might feel a little too familiar.

The candid moment

In a new chat with CharlieIntel (picked up by Dexerto), Treyarch senior director of production Yale Miller was asked if Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 might look interchangeable with last year’s Black Ops 6. He didn’t dodge it.

"I think the honest answer is yes. I worry about that."

He added that this release cadence isn’t random.

"Obviously, there was a plan with the two MW games and then this."

How we got here (the quick, mildly confusing timeline)

• 2007, 2009, 2011: The original Modern Warfare trilogy (Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare; Modern Warfare 2; Modern Warfare 3)
• 2019: Modern Warfare gets rebooted
• 2022 and 2023: Modern Warfare 2 and Modern Warfare 3 release back-to-back as sequels to the 2019 reboot (not the 2007–2011 games)
• 2024: Black Ops 6 arrives
• November 14, 2025: Black Ops 7 is set to launch, just over a year after BO6

If that naming maze makes your eye twitch, you’re not alone. That’s the inside baseball of this franchise: multiple MW games with the same numbers across different eras, now followed by two Black Ops entries nearly on top of each other. The concern is obvious — when releases stack this tightly, the games can blur together.

So what is Treyarch doing about it?

Treyarch is trying to ward off the deja vu with an ambitious new co-op adventure in Black Ops 7. The studio is pitching it as a shake-up for the single-player side of Call of Duty — their words, not mine — something designed to stretch what a campaign can do.

Or, as they put it, they believe it can "redefine what campaign can be in Call of Duty."

The worry is real

Miller didn’t pretend everything is fine. He called out the franchise’s future as an open question and acknowledged the risk that players see BO7 and BO6 as same-y.

"We’ll see what the franchise does in the future. We’re excited about the opportunities it gave us, but we’d all be dead lying if we said we weren’t worried about that."

Bottom line: Black Ops 7 lands November 14, 2025, very close to Black Ops 6 on the calendar and, at a glance, not wildly different. If you’re feeling a little deja vu, the devs feel it too — and they’re betting a co-op campaign twist is enough to break the loop.