Admit it, you wish you came up with that title.
There’s some interesting new rumors about Call of Duty for 2025.
A Twitter account named Fumo Leaks shared some information that they got from someone who was in a focus group meeting for this game. But we are going to base our report on Tom Henderson’s coverage on Insider Gaming. Tom corroborated that this leak was real, but also incorporated other information that he collected and verified on his own.
Tom says that the game is using the internal codename Saturn, and it is distinctly set in the Black Ops timeline. Now, Call of Duty: Black Ops 2, a game originally released in 2012, is set in its fictional timeline in the year 2025. The Call of Duty game planned to release in the real-world year of 2025, will be set in the Black Ops’ universe’s fictional timeline, in the year 2030.
Tom didn’t put too much weight on the smaller details from Fumo Leaks for a reason. He says that the game is still in the early stages of development, and so everything is tentative and can be changed in the final product.
What Tom does know is that Activision has decided to bring back the pick 10 create-a-class system, as well as the Gunfight and Zombies modes. It may also see an overhaul of the movement system, though whether that overhaul will be an iteration of Omnimovement or something else entirely is yet to be determined.
Speaking of Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 and its debut of the Omnimovement system, Tom also cannot say what will be allowed to Carry Forward from that game, which is coming next week, and the 2025 Call of Duty. It may not entirely make sense given how far apart the two games are in the timeline, but maybe Activision will choose to make the fans happy over sticking to the notion of a canon. So we’ll see how that goes too.
Activision seems to have made one key choice thanks to a lesson learned from the game before Call of Duty: Black Ops 6, which is Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III. They don’t want 2025’s Call of Duty to be seen as a glorified DLC pack for Call of Duty: Black Ops 6.
So, the plan is to release the new Call of Duty 2025 maps with remastered maps from Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 when the game launches. But if these rumors are true, it certainly sounds like the 2025 release will be reusing some assets from Call of Duty: Black Ops 6.
For all that it’s worth, we don’t think that’s automatically a bad thing. If Activision can deliver a product that makes the fans happy, reusing assets instead of starting over from scratch with a half-baked product is the right choice. But Activision, now under Microsoft, definitely has to deliver a product that has enough production values, game design, and content density, to make those fans happy.
As the second Call of Duty to be produced under Microsoft Gaming, Activision also has a lot of expectations to live up to. And we aren’t really thinking of what Sarah Bond and Phil Spencer would love to see, as much as we are thinking of what the number crunchers have set as the studio’s goals.
Call of Duty is front and center in one of the biggest video game industry acquisitions in history. What’s at stake is no longer whether gamers are happy, or how much the games can line up Bobby Kotick’s pockets. The future of the industry is quite literally at stake with this franchise’s short term success, or failure. So let’s all hope that Activision gets this one right, just like the game arriving next week.