CoD campaigns will reportedly ’embrace’ controversial open-world gameplay moving forward

The days of straightforward and linear Call of Duty campaign missions may be a thing of the past.

The next CoD, rumored to be titled Black Ops Gulf War, “is set to embrace an open-world campaign,” according to a new report by Insider Gaming’s Tom Henderson. But it won’t be like Modern Warfare 3’s controversial “open combat missions.”

According to Henderson’s sources, the new CoD’s campaign “has been built from the ground up, rather than using assets from previous entries” like MW3’s open combat missions, which tasked players with objectives on repurposed Warzone maps like Verdansk and Urzikstan.

This news may be concerning to many players, especially those who played MW3’s campaigns and experienced the open combat missions, which were lambasted by many for being a copy-paste, “Warzone with cutscenes” experience that seemed to be more of an exhibition of previous battle royale maps than anything else in an effort to stretch out the already-short storyline.

The new campaign, reportedly being developed by main Warzone lead dev Raven Software, will instead have players “and their squad” (with returning characters like Adler) navigating an open-world map that’s “more akin to that of Far Cry” than what CoD players may be used to in previous campaign entries.

Beyond 2024, Henderson said next year’s CoD (which apparently “doesn’t have an assigned leading developer” yet), has also been “pitched” to have its campaign be open-world “with its map being separated into several different biomes/locations.”

There’s currently no release date or official title for CoD 2024 scheduled just yet, but the game is likely being developed by Treyarch, whose last full title was Black Ops Cold War in 2020. Given CoD’s history, the new game will likely release in October or November, with a reveal taking place sometime this summer.