Black Ops 6 ending, explained: Who was the guy at the end?

Call of Duty’s campaigns are always worth playing for a few hours of entertaining fun, but none more so than the Black Ops games.

Black Ops 6’s campaign is one of the best in recent memory for its varied gameplay, upgrade-centered progression, interesting characters, and plot twists. I recommend all CoD players play through it whenever they get the chance.

But as is usually the case with the Black Ops games, the campaign asks more questions than it answers, with teases for what’s to come. When the campaign ends on a new face, everyone else asks the same question: Who was that guy?

Read on below for our explanation of the BO6 campaign, including who that was at the end.

BO6 campaign ending, explained

At the end of Black Ops 6’s campaign, the day gets saved as the rogue Black Ops squad prevents the Cradle from being deployed from the U.S. Capitol Building. Both Case and Harrow are presumed dead after Case was exposed to the bioweapon again and was seen strangling Harrow to death.

The next cutscene after the credits closes the story and teases what’s to come. Woods, Adler, Marshall, and Felix meet up with Livingstone while Sev watches on with a sniper rifle. Livingstone reveals to the team that he wishes to recruit the team to work for him.

“I can provide whatever you need,” Livingstone says. “Accommodations, resources, cash, additional manpower. All of it off the books.” So it appears that the squad will work in the dark again. Hence, the name Black Ops, after all.

Livingstone says that even though Harrow is gone, he believes Pantheon is still a threat and that they are still working from within the CIA. That’s when the scene cuts to the big reveal at the end.

Who was that at the end of the BO6 campaign?

At the end of the BO6 campaign, the man appears to be Jackson Caine, a multiplayer operator and leader of Crimson One, the faction that’s the enemy of Rogue Black Ops in BO6.

Caine sits at Livingstone’s computer terminal inside the CIA and hacks it, proving that Livingstone was right. The tease here is that Caine is an enemy within and the next big villain moving forward. But the story likely will continue before a potential Black Ops 7.

As with the past few titles, BO6’s storyline will continue via seasonal content drops. New cutscenes and story beats will move the plot forward each season and eventually lead to the next sequel. Black Ops Cold War did something similar, featuring a story about Adler and an old enemy named Stitch.

Caine’s bio in the multiplayer menu reveals that he trained alongside Marshall. He joined the military like his father, “who returned from Vietnam a broken man,” and joined Pantheon after his brother was killed in action in Lebanon as “the tragedies took their toll.”

Little else is known about Caine or Crimson One thus far, but expect season one of Black Ops 6 to include Caine and move the story forward for the Rogue Black Ops squad, too.

Basically, stay tuned for more from the BO6 story, Caine, and the rest of the squad in future seasons. BO6’s season one currently does not have a release date, but it will drop before the end of the year, with rumors suggesting a potential Nov. 14 release date.