Call of Duty Black Ops: Cold War is officially this year’s installment in the popular first-person shooter franchise. Revealed in a teaser in late August after days of teasing the game’s announcement, the sequel focus on the tensions between the United States and Russia during the height of the Cold War.
Yet, although the teaser did a good job of setting up the general themes and conflict of the new game, it still left plenty of questions to answer. How will the new game work in tandem with Modern Warfare‘s current Warzone battle royale mode? Or will Cold War get its own battle royale mode for players to obsess over?
Most important of all, since Treyarch and Raven Software are developing Cold War together, does this mean that the new Call of Duty game will have a Zombies mode?
At the moment, we don’t know, but there’s a very good chance, considering that Treyarch is the studio that first created Call of Duty‘s beloved Zombies mode.
First introduced in the dark WWII installment Call of Duty: World at War, the beloved, zany Zombies mode has been a mainstay of Treyarch’s entries in the series. The mode, which pits a team of survivors against a hungry horde of military-themed flesh-eaters, has had many iterations, from maps set in an overrun theater in Germany to the Pentagon during the Cold War to an icy grave haunted by a zombified George A. Romero to a hellish bus ride across an undead wasteland. Each Zombies mode usually brings a bit of lighthearted, arcade fun to the more serious tone of the campaigns and multiplayer.
Since this new Treyarch game is set during the Cold War, could this mean that players could get another chance to survive the zombie apocalypse as John F. Kennedy, Robert McNamara, Richard Nixon, and Fidel Castro in “Five” from the first Black Ops? That would be a nice blast from the past!
The first teaser for Cold War itself looks to the past to set the stage for what’s to come, reminding us of a time when the threat of nuclear war was always looming and superpowers were vying for world domination:
The trailer mostly revolves around KGB defector Yuri Bezmenov, a former Soviet journalist who famously warned the world of a Soviet spy tasked with infiltrating Western intelligence in order to win the nuclear arms race at the height of the Cold War. A major part of the plan? A decades-long operation to destabilize the United States from within.
The trailer flashes through moments of unrest in American history, including the Vietnam War and the civil rights protests. As the trailer explains, the spy, codenamed “Perseus,” was never caught and his identity remains a mystery decades later. It’s possible the game could revolve around finding this mysterious Perseus or the teaser is just an overture for the deeper Cold War themes at play in the game.
The setting and subject of this year’s Call of Duty game have been an open secret for some time. First scooped by vetted Call of Duty leaker Okami, Eurogamer later confirmed the game’s title and Cold War focus. The official confirmation from Activision came just days after an ARG released by the publisher fueled speculation and sent fans on a mad scramble to uncover the nature of the new game.
So what do we know about the game beyond the U.S. vs. Russia conflict itself? Very little. While waiting for the reveal, we took a look at what pieces of Cold War history could show up in the game. Treyarch has previously set Cold War-era games in Vietnam, Russia, Afghanistan, and Nicaragua. It remains to be seen if Call of Duty Black Ops: Cold War will revisit these locations in new ways.
We’ll know for sure when Verdansk world reveal takes place on Aug. 26.