Treyarch address concerns Black Ops 7 was held back by last-gen consoles

Although not many games are being released on last-gen consoles anymore, Black Ops 7 will still be available on the Xbox One and PS4. 

Since other big franchises, like Battlefield, have ditched last-gen, there are concerns that Call of Duty’s continued cross-gen status is holding it back. However, in an exclusive interview with CharlieIntel, they explained that they don’t let last-gen hold them back, and instead build the games for current-gen and PC.

Black Ops 7 is built for current-gen and PC

“The way we’ve talked about it always is, you should never be thinking about old-gen for the features that you’re designing,” explained Yale Miller, Treyarch’s Senior Director of Production.

They would build the game for PS5, Xbox Series, and PC, then look at what they could do on PS4 and Xbox One. If the feature works on last-gen, then it’ll be on last-gen. If it won’t, then they won’t include it. 

Activision

Lawrence Metten brought up Theater Mode as an example of this. “That’s something that we knew we wanted to do, Theater. 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.”

They said the core game is still the same, and they do what they can to put lots of players and zombies on screen, but “the visual experience is nowhere near where it needs to be.” 

But why are they still making the game for last-gen consoles? The simple reason is that “a shocking number of people play it,” and that it helps with matchmaking. 

“It made sense for us to do it, and we could. 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,” said Miller.