Call of Duty Faces a Critical Moment with Black Ops 7

Call of Duty: Black Ops 7’s release is just under two months away, and its beta is about two weeks away. This is a pivotal moment in time for the franchise. Black Ops 6 did a great job generating pre-launch and immediate-post launch hype, but excitement died down fast; largely due to over-the-top cosmetics and terrible map design.

Beyond BO6’s hype falling off fast, the reveal of Black Ops 7 has become the most poorly received Call of Duty reveal since Infinite Warfare back in 2016, nearly a full decade ago. The initial showing of Black ops 7 did not get people excited in the way that Activision and the developers would’ve been hoping it would.

Add on top of all of that the looming threat of what appears to be a genuinely good Battlefield game, and it’s fair to say COD may be in a little bit of a crisis mode right now. Fans need to see something the call of Duty franchise hasn’t shown in a while – real, notable effort to improve the core experience of the games.

One major problem Call of Duty has dealt with as the implementation of cross play and Warzone with MW2019 is cheaters. Cheating has been out of control in Call of Duty for a while, with fans questioning whether the game’s proprietary anti-cheat RICOCHET was actually doing anything at all. Ahead of Black Ops 7, Team Ricochet has some updates that could help improve its ability to actually stop cheaters.

In the Black Ops 7 beta, Ricochet will require the Windows settings options of TPM 2.0 and Secure boot to be active in order to play. In addition to these two settings being required, they mention that a brand new updated form of Ricochet will be coming with the full release of Black Ops 7, though they didn’t detail what those updates would be.