Call of Duty Black Ops 7 finally includes a fully playable co-op campaign, that, by all intents and purposes, is being completely ignored by the players.
The Black Ops 7 campaign, which you can tackle solo or with up to four friends of yours, has a completion rate of roughly 0.3 percent on Steam, with a whopping 0.1% making it to the final mission and beating it. Oops.
Why is the Call of Duty Black Ops 7 Campaign Being Ignored?
Structurally, the campaign doesn’t do a lot different than before, it’s built as a string of eleven co-op missions, with each one feeding into a larger metagame. That’s a cool idea, since all of your operators, loadouts, and abilities carry across story, multiplayer, and even the Zombies mode.
The progression itself is pretty unified, so that any game mode will help you in the others. In theory, that does include the single player campaign a lot more into the overall Call of Duty-ness than previous titles, instead of being the old “been there, done that” CoD campaign.
To put the cherry on top of that very lead-filled cake, Treyarch also added the Endgame as a bridge between the story and the live service content. So, if you finish the campaign, you unlock a 32-player mode set in Avalon, where squads chase objectives under time pressure and risk losing their gear on death – sound familiar?
If we’d have to wager a guess, we’d say that this hodgepodge of different mechanics, systems, and “ideas”, is the reason why the campaign – and the game itself – doesn’t seem to hold ground as much with players as the older titles have.
It is being labelled the worst Call of Duty campaign of all time, so, has the franchise completely lost its identity? Let’s explore.
The Black Ops 7 Campaign Stats Tell a Story of Neglect
Look at the numbers and the mood around the Call of Duty Black Ops 7 Campaign changes fast. Steam achievement data shows roughly 0.3 percent of players have completed the first co-op mission, and only around 0.01 percent have made it to the final mission. That is not a hardcore completionist gap, that is almost nobody touching the mode in any serious way.
Console numbers do not make this bleak picture any better, and that’s saying something – Call of Duty has always been heavy on their console support. Take PlayStation for example, around 0.7 percent of players have earned the trophy tied to finishing that first mission.
On Xbox things don’t look much better, as the same achievement sits at roughly 1.1 percent. For a brand new Call of Duty in its launch window, those are the kind of stats you normally see years later on optional DLC, not the central campaign. Maybe the time of yearly releases is finally over?
Funny enough, at the same time, Black Ops 7 is doing just fine elsewhere. Multiplayer and Zombies are pulling strong player counts as players enter the long slog in Race to Prestige’s return, review coverage regularly highlights those modes as the real stars, and Endgame is already being talked up as the long-tail hook. The co-op story is there, technically ambitious, but the broader audience is voting with its time and skipping it.
When only fractions of a percent finish mission one in the Call of Duty Black Ops 7 Campaign, it becomes hard to argue that the mode is landing as the main attraction, no matter how much the marketing leans on it – and the bleeding into the other parts of the CoD microcosmos doesn’t seem to do much in Treyarch’s favor either.
The Black Ops 7 Campaign is an Afterthought
Now, before you take out the torches and pitchforks, nobody is saying the Call of Duty Black Ops 7 campaign is bad – or broken. It works as intended, we commend the inclusion into the wider progression web, and the ideas put forward are more ambitious than we’re used to in recent years – at least from Call of Duty.
The issue we have are the priorities the devs seem to have, since all other modes appear to have a clear focus, what with multiplayer having tuning passes and a very apparent focus on esports. The Zombies mode has a decade of lore and fan favoritism to back it up, and the Endgame has the seasonal grind people seem to love so much attached to it.
So what does the campaign have to offer? Not much, if you believe the completion percentages on Steam and the two current-gen consoles.
The campaign doesn’t seem to be a part of the Call of Duty experience players value anymore, it feels more like an afterthought for a boring afternoon. It’s optional content sloppily bolted onto what really is a true multiplayer title.
So, the question is – are the days of memorable and decidedly loud and cool Call of Duty campaigns over? If even diehard fans can’t be bothered to finish the first mission of the game, there might be a shift for Call of Duty in the making.
