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00:00Call of Duty Black Ops is a decades-spanning tale of deception, betrayal, and questionable
00:08psychiatry. It's just one of COD's several separate sub-series, but it's by far the beefiest.
00:14Back in 2010, it would have been easy for developer Treyarch to whip up some jungle
00:18assets and ship Call of Duty 7 Vietnam. But instead, it unleashed a sprawling techno-thriller
00:24with all-you-can-eat acronyms in which half the characters are hallucinations and the rest are
00:29historical figures up to no good. Black Ops is where Call of Duty gets weird, a stylish head trip
00:34with plot twists to spare. There's a century's worth of storyline in this epic espionage saga
00:40with more on the way, so consider this your pre-mission briefing ahead of Black Ops 7.
00:45Here is everything you need to know about the Black Ops story so far.
00:49Blops is a twisted web of flashbacks, dream sequences, and choice-driven alternate endings,
01:03so we're charting the most chronological and canonical path we can. It begins with a world at war.
01:12Stalingrad, September 1942. Red Army soldier Dmitry Petrenko claws his way through streets of
01:19corpses, guided by his comrade, Soviet sniper, Viktor Reznov. Reznov's father was killed by the Nazis,
01:26creating in him a thirst for payback so deep that not even death will quench it.
01:30We will take the fight to their land. To their people. To their blood.
01:41Petrenko and Reznov blast into Berlin and plant the hammer and sickle atop the Reichstag in 1945.
01:47Black Ops 1 reveals their post-war fates. Treacherous officer Nikita Dragovich and his pet sadist,
01:54Lev Krebchenko, drag our heroes into a task force hunting German scientist, Frederick Steiner.
02:00Do not point that weapon at me, Russian dog!
02:04The evil genius behind a doomsday nerve gas called Nova 6. They corner the unrepentant jerk
02:10in the Arctic Circle where Steiner defects to Reznov's disgust.
02:14You will take me to Dragovich.
02:17Dragovich betrays Reznov and gasses his men with the Nova 6, killing several including our POV character from World at War.
02:25Reznov is rescued by the British but sinks the Nova stockpile beneath the ice.
02:29Dragovich, Krebchenko and Steiner escape with the formula.
02:33Reznov is recaptured and sent to the Vorkuta prison camp where he waits 16 years for a new protagonist to bro out with.
02:4261 Bay of Pigs. What happened?
02:45We all got killed.
02:47During the Bay of Pigs invasion, the United States supports a coup that fails to overthrow Fidel Castro's government.
02:53In real life, the U.S. provided funding, training and air support for the revolution.
02:58In Black Ops 1, the CIA sends some special ops assassins to eliminate Castro.
03:03Alaskan Marine Alex Mason, Navy Seal Joseph Bowman, and chain-smoking, nigh-unkillable veteran Frank Woods.
03:11Mason and Woods become the bedrock characters of Blops.
03:15Bowman, not so much.
03:17Bowman! Bowman! Bowman!
03:20Treyarch's trio take down El Comandante's body double.
03:24Mason is captured and taunted by an alive and well Fidel.
03:28Castro hands his prisoner over to returning Soviet heavies Krebchenko and Dragovich, who throw him in the gulag at Vorkuta.
03:36I have plans for you, American.
03:39The bad guys rewire Mason's brain to become a sleeper agent controlled by a cryptic numbers station.
03:45Mason resists, with the help of Reznov, his lone ally in the bowels of the Russian prison, Shawshank Redemption in a Soviet labor camp.
03:53Reznov.
03:57Mason.
03:58As the men bond, Reznov programs a back door into Mason's brain, compelling him to annihilate Steiner, Krebchenko, and Dragovich by any means necessary.
04:08Dragovich.
04:09Krebchenko.
04:10Steiner.
04:11All my style.
04:12Every journey begins with a single step.
04:16Reznov engineers an uprising with a catchy eight-step plan that doubles as a conditioning tool.
04:22Big Vic sacrifices his own freedom so Mason can catch the last train out of Vorkuta, ending his two-year imprisonment.
04:28Step eight, Reznov! Freedom!
04:30For you, Mason! Not for me!
04:33The extremely traumatized Mason is assigned to handler Jason Hudson and summoned to the Pentagon.
04:40Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara briefs them on Dragovich's plans, while Mason, who probably should have taken some self-care PTO, starts to unravel.
04:49We were watching you the whole time.
04:52Mason's mental breakdown crescendos when he meets John F. Kennedy as Dragovich's programming services.
04:58Despite the fact that he just crashed out in front of the president, Mason's bosses send him to sabotage the Soyuz space program and torch the team of Nazi scientists working on Nova 6.
05:13The team rescues double agent Grigori Weaver, who loses an eye in the process.
05:17He doesn't have a massive role beyond Blocks 1, but he plays a pivotal part in the Zombies Dark Aether saga, one of many characters who found new life within the mode.
05:27Most operators would call it a day there, but because of Reznov's programming, Mason literally cannot stop until he finds and ends Dragovich.
05:35The gang blows up his limo, but they bail before the kill is confirmed.
05:39Dragovich, did you confirm the kill?
05:43Five days later, President Kennedy is assassinated in Dallas, Texas.
05:48Mason is present at the scene, but the CIA is quite unbothered by the brainwashed killing machine's proximity to the crime of the century and keeps him on the payroll.
05:59In Vietnam, Mason joins up with old buddies Woods and Bowman in search of Soviet intel on Nova 6.
06:09Mason meets with a defector that he believes is Viktor Reznov.
06:12Reznov, how'd you get out of Okuda?
06:15And they survive a lot of action set pieces together.
06:18The crew eventually arrives in Laos to secure a plane crash carrying a cargo of Nova 6, but the gas is gone when they arrive.
06:30Viet Cong and Spetsnaz troops ambush Team Blobs and force them to play Russian roulette in a gruesome homage to the Deer Hunter.
06:37Fuck!
06:39After Bowman is brutally murdered, Mason and Woods fight their way free, hijack a hind, and bust up Kravchenko's headquarters, saving Reznov once again.
06:49Kravchenko is here.
06:51Woods sacrifices himself to save Mason from the cornered Kravchenko, and both men are presumed dead.
06:58I deny you son of a bitch.
07:00In true Call of Duty fashion, neither are.
07:03Meanwhile, Weaver and Hudson make contact with Dr. Steiner, who is now terrified of Dragovich and desperate to flip on him.
07:09He reveals that Dragovich is hours away from ordering sleeper agents to unleash Nova 6 across the US, provoking nuclear war.
07:17Hudson and Weaver rush to Steiner's lab on Rebirth Island, but Mason and his guardian angel beat them to it.
07:23They infiltrate the facility on their own and find Steiner.
07:26My name is Victor Reznov, and I will have my revenge!
07:37Reznov executes the Nazi scientist, but that's not what Hudson and Weaver see.
07:41Mason is alone, and they watch him pull the trigger himself.
07:45Mason, no!
07:46Hudson and Weaver take Mason in and race to unravel his severely compromised brain to stop World War 3.
07:53Their desperate interrogation makes up the iconic frame narrative of Black Ops 1.
07:58We learn the truth.
07:59Reznov died in Vorkuta, and the disgruntled old soldier who's been following Mason around is a Fight Club-style figment of his imagination.
08:07Mason decodes the sequence and leads a strike on Dragovich's undersea numbers station.
08:12In the final showdown, Mason strangles Dragovich and puts an end to his decades-spanning plot.
08:18This will not be the last of Mason's problems.
08:21With Black Ops in the bag, we leap forward four games in the release order to Black Ops Cold War, set in the brief window of the 1980s before the flashback sequences of Black Ops 2.
08:31Dragovich is dead, Mason is half out of his mind, and a new figure named Perseus has emerged from the ashes.
08:38This is Hudson.
08:40How long until we have a lead on Perseus?
08:42They're about to get started.
08:43Soviet spymaster Perseus amasses power and creates his own rogue intelligence network to sow discord across the world.
08:51By 1981, they've stolen an American-made nuclear bomb courtesy of Operation Greenlight, an extremely dubious top-secret program that hid scorched-earth nukes all across Europe.
09:03Woods is back in action after blowing up and escaping from a POW camp.
09:07I was not gonna die in a swamp!
09:10Hudson asks him to join Mason and new super spy guy Russell Adler to hunt down Perseus for the CIA.
09:17Can you stop Perseus?
09:19We can, sir.
09:20They capture an injured Perseus lieutenant and bring them in for some light MK-Ultra conditioning.
09:26If you believed you were someone else, we could lead you to a place where you'd give everything up.
09:31MI6 agent Helen Park helps implant the Perseus agent with false memories of serving with Adler in Vietnam in order to exploit them for intel.
09:40Reborn as Belle, the new player character joins Adler's team, where they're kept in check with a would-you-kindly-style control phrase,
09:48We've got a job to do.
09:50We've got a job to do.
09:51We've got a job to do.
09:52We've got a job to do.
09:53We've got a job to do.
09:54We've got a job to do.
09:55They gather a CIA Scooby gang and uncover a Spetsnaz training ground dressed up like an idyllic American suburb.
10:01What the hell is this place?
10:03Complete with an arcade and period-appropriate Doritos.
10:07They confirm that the stolen nuke was of US origin and learn the truth about Operation Greenlight and their boss's role in it.
10:14Hudson was not only aware of the plan, he was in charge of it.
10:18You knew the nuke was from Greenlight! Didn't tell us!
10:20This understandably upsets the squad, but they shelve their beef and plot to steal a list of sleeper agents from KGB headquarters in Moscow.
10:28With the help of a mole named Belikov, Adler and Bell infiltrate the Lubyanka and cross paths with Mikhail Gorbachev and a bunch of Soviet spooks,
10:37including young Imran Zakhaev, the future final boss of modern warfare.
10:42The two series don't cross over very often, but there are sporadic hints that the worlds of Treyarch and Infinity Ward aren't as separate as they seem.
10:49And thank you all for welcoming me with open arms.
10:52The agents go loud and escape with the sleeper list, which points them to a greenlight scientist named Hastings.
10:58By the time they find him, it's too late. Perseus has the activation codes.
11:02What? Are you telling me Perseus can detonate multiple nukes in Europe?
11:06Adler abandons his totally subtle mind meld scheme and force-feeds drugs directly into Bell's brain instead.
11:13Damn. Through the eye socket. Are you sure about this, Doc?
11:16Their past as a Perseus agent resurfaces along with the location of the secret base.
11:21Now the story can go a few different ways from here, but as far as canon is concerned, Bell lets Adler's intrusion slide and gives up the real location.
11:30The team destroys Perseus' monastery stronghold and secures the nukes, but the man himself escapes.
11:36Hudson, wanting to clear up any loose ends, orders Adler to execute Bell as the story concludes.
11:42It was never personal.
11:49Cold War sits awkwardly in the Black Ops timeline.
11:52You'd think someone would mention the whole seeding a continent with nukes thing over the next few decades of the story,
11:58but the retcon still works, and characters like Park will pop up in future games.
12:03The real main event of Black Ops in the 1980s isn't Perseus, however.
12:08It's Raul Menendez, a ruthless arms dealer turned charismatic cult leader locked in a 40-year blood feud with Mason and Woods.
12:16It's Raul Menendez.
12:18I told you he would be here.
12:21Are your men ready to move?
12:23As soon as I give the order.
12:24Give it.
12:25Alex Mason has retired to Alaska's frozen tundra, raising his son David and being generally irritable.
12:31You're seven years old, David. Stop acting like a baby.
12:34Ex-handler Hudson and Oliver North come a-knockin' with one last job.
12:38Uncle Woods has gotten himself captured again while messing around in the Angolan Civil War.
12:43Mason and Hudson rescue Woods.
12:45It's me, Mason!
12:46And in the process, Mason crosses paths with an ice-cold young arms dealer named Raul Menendez.
12:52The men scuffle, Mason shoots his eye out and leaves him for dead.
13:00At this point in his career, Mason has slaughtered entire armies of hostile NPCs.
13:06So what difference does one more gunrunner make?
13:09But Menendez survives with a gnarly scar and swears vengeance on the spook.
13:14Raul was raised during Nicaragua's dirty wars, watching US-backed Contras tear his homeland to shreds.
13:21His animosity towards America became personal when his beloved sister Josefina was nearly burned alive by a greedy American businessman.
13:28Raul and his father built a massive drug cartel that attracted the ire of the CIA.
13:33The agency murked Papa Menendez in front of his son, which further soured Raul's feelings towards the United States.
13:39By 1986, he's running arms with the Soviets in Afghanistan.
13:43Mason and company are sent to intervene, linking up with local freedom fighters and a Chinese contact named Tian Zhao.
13:50They survive a Soviet attack led by Lev Kravchenko, the last of the Dragovich loyalists.
13:56Of course he's involved in all this!
13:58The Soviet of Kravchenko does a number on Mason's, let's face it, completely cooked brain, but it's Woods who canonically delivers the kill shot after they learn about a mole in the CIA.
14:11The leader turns on the Americans under orders from Menendez, leaving the squad to die in the desert.
14:18A delirious Mason sees Tricky Vic Reznov ride in on horseback to save the day.
14:25The CIA finds the Menendez family compound in Nicaragua and cuts a check to Manuel Noriega, the real-life Panamanian dictator on the US payroll.
14:33Noriega's goons storm the compound and brutalize Josefina.
14:37Raul goes berserk.
14:41Noriega shoots his own men and lets Menendez go as a favor, which Raul returns by nearly beating the general to death.
14:49When they finally meet, Woods hurls a grenade meant for Raul, but a bad bounce means it kills Josefina instead.
14:56Raul survives and vows that Woods and the entire world will one day feel his absolute loss.
15:02Three years later, Menendez puts his plan into motion.
15:05I was pretty sure we got him in Nicaragua. About a year later, he shows up in Panama with that piece of shit Noriega.
15:12The U.S. invades Panama with the aim of overthrowing Noriega.
15:15In real life, Noriega was smoked out of a Vatican embassy by Van Halen music on loop.
15:21In Bloch's world, he's captured by, who else, Mason and Woods.
15:25This is not the deal. Call your boss.
15:28Hudson informs his men that Noriega is a high-value individual to be exchanged for an anonymous prisoner.
15:34Hudson tells Woods that the hooded captive is their Nexus target, Raul Menendez, and orders him to shoot the restrained prisoner during the swap.
15:42Take the headshot.
15:44To Woods' horror, the man is really Alex Mason, and while the canon isn't absolutely clear about this, it's widely believed that Mason is no more.
15:54Mason!
15:56Boom.
15:57Afterwards, the real Menendez appears, blows away Woods' kneecaps, and reveals that he's kidnapped Mason's son David.
16:04Menendez used the boy as leverage to force Hudson to do his bidding.
16:08He slits Hudson's throat with Josefina's locket, leaves David traumatized, and spares Woods to suffer with the guilt of killing his closest friend.
16:16In one fell swoop, two lead characters from the previous Black Ops game were wiped off the board and another horribly mutilated, leaving young David to pick up the pieces.
16:26A story to which will return after a detour through the early 90s for Black Ops 6.
16:32Woods spends the intervening years riding a desk and raising David as best he can without revealing the truth behind his father's death.
16:39The CIA believes that Russell Adler is the mole paid off by Menendez to team kill his COD clan.
16:45Woods doesn't buy it and suspects a shadow faction inside the agency itself, Pantheon.
16:51Pantheon began as a CIA subdivision in the 70s, experimenting with a psychotropic super soldier serum called Project Cradle.
16:59After a disastrous outbreak of the Cradle virus turned survivors into hallucinating rage monsters, Deputy Director Daniel Livingstone officially disavowed it.
17:08The group reformed as an independent rogue cabal, reviving Cradle in secret while fanning the flames of America's forever wars.
17:15Speaking of which, grab your best bootleg Bart Simpson shirt and get ready to rip some packs of Gulf War generals,
17:22because it's 1991 and we're invading Iraq the first time.
17:29We will chair-bound Woods is fielding a new team.
17:39It's protege Troy Marshall, Ops Specialist Jane Harrow, and the enigmatic William Case Calderon.
17:45The squad is tasked to extract Saddam Hussein's defecting defense minister Salid Alawi,
17:51but the target is executed on the spot by fugitive Russell Adler.
17:55Adler!
17:56Stand down!
17:57Stand down!
17:58Stand down!
17:59Adler insists that the CIA is compromised and says he couldn't allow the man to fall into Pantheon's clutches.
18:04He surrenders himself with a simple riddle for Woods.
18:07Bishop takes Brooke.
18:08Livingstone dismisses his warning and suspends the squad, who decide to follow Adler's trail anyway.
18:14Brooke refers to an old KGB safe house in Bulgaria that Adler and Woods discovered during their adventures in the 70s.
18:20The disgraced team shacks up there and recruits some new allies.
18:24German tech guy Felix Neumann and Sev Dumas, an assassin from the fictional city-state of Avalon.
18:30He was trained and betrayed by the Guild, an underground criminal network that will become way more important in the sequel.
18:37With the gang assembled, they break out Adler from a CIA black site deep beneath the US Capitol building,
18:44while Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton works the room at a glitzy gala upstairs.
18:48Back at the Rook, Adler explains that Pantheon was in bed with Hussein trading experimental weapons for access to his definitely real WMD facilities.
18:57Pantheon gets covered in facilities. Hussein gets access to an experimental weapon.
19:01Tells them about Cradle and where they might find it.
19:04Next stop, Saddam's palace.
19:09With help from Cold War's Helen Park, the rogue bloppers infiltrate Hussein's gilded bunker.
19:15Among his hoard of treasures, the squad finds a sample of Cradle.
19:18They also discover that Jane Harrow is Pantheon's mole within the CIA,
19:22and trace the virus' origin to a research facility on American soil.
19:27When they arrive in Kentucky, Case falls down an elevator shaft
19:30and is exposed to the Cradle, experiencing a zombie nightmare.
19:36Case overcomes his blopped protagonist amnesia and unlocks his past.
19:40He was the failed original test Case for a Cradle-powered super soldier.
19:44The project was scrapped, his memories were erased,
19:47and he was welcomed back into the loving arms of the CIA,
19:50which remains oddly unconcerned with the scrambling of its employees' minds.
19:55A casino heist points the squad towards Gusev, Harrow's cradle scientist.
20:00He's hiding out in Kuwait, so Case, Adler, and Lawrence Sims, another Cold War veteran, ground his flight.
20:06You're a hard man to find, Gusev.
20:08Gusev tells the gang that Pantheon's headquarters is located in an old Soviet prison camp.
20:13Victor Reznov's old haunt, or Cuda, ground zero for the entire Black Ops saga.
20:19In the most shameless nostalgia fest since Old Snake returned to Shadow Moses,
20:24Team Rogue Blops revisits the Gulag and apprehends the traitorous Harrow.
20:29Easy! Easy!
20:30They dose her with truth serum and drag the whole story out of her.
20:33She blames Adler for the home invasion deaths of her parents and joined Pantheon for revenge.
20:39Jake, no, go!
20:43Their master plan is to use the Cradle for a false flag terror attack on Washington, D.C.
20:48The Iraqis would take the fall, Livingstone would be KIA, and Harrow slash Pantheon would be in charge of the CIA.
20:55You. Me.
20:57Pantheon invades the Rook, setting off a climactic safehouse standoff.
21:01Harrow attempts to escape on helicopter, but Case boards her vessel mid-flight.
21:05Completely geeked on Cradle, Case strangles Harrow in a blind rage and sends the chopper crashing into a river where both are presumed dead.
21:14Sure they are.
21:16Livingstone makes peace with Woods, Adler, and Marshall, and encourages them to hang out their shingle as an off-the-books rogue Black Ops cell.
21:23In a final stinger, we see that Pantheon is down but not out as another mole, Jackson Kane, slips into Livingstone's office and hacks into his computer.
21:31We thought they were long gone, but it turns out they never left.
21:38The story continues 44 years later in Black Ops 7, but first, there's the matter of Menendez to attend to.
21:46In 2014, a social movement named Cordis D.A. emerges from the internet.
21:50Its charismatic leader Odysseus gains followers with his impassioned rants against the corrupt 1%.
21:56He engineers riots in Iran and North Korea and develops an unstoppable computer worm out of the rare earth metal selerium with the help of hacker Chloe Lynch.
22:05He uses it to hack the Chinese stock exchange in 2018, pinning the blame on the U.S.
22:10and triggering a second Cold War between NATO and China amid an escalated drone arms race.
22:16Mason's former ally, Tian Zhao, is in charge of China's SDC and working with Menendez, combining their vast resources to heat up the conflict and usher in a new world order.
22:27Never seen in public, who really is the leader of Cordis D.A.?
22:31By the far-off distant future of 2025, Cordis D.A. has amassed two billion followers, none of whom realize their cult leader is the Nicaraguan narco-terrorist.
22:41And that the entire Occupy Blobs movement was just a cover for one man's mad-on against Woods and Mason.
22:48Young David Mason is now a Navy SEAL operator named Section, who still checks in on his dear old Uncle Frank.
22:54Menendez makes the first move by visiting a still-living, still-smoking woods in the vault, a retirement home for Meme's and Pop-Pops with red in their ledger.
23:03He leaves behind the pendant he used to murder Hudson.
23:07Hey, old man. I was roaming in this here today.
23:11Section and his JSOC boys, Mike Harper and Javier Salazar, visit Woods for some action-packed 60s flashbacks.
23:18The old man gives them the dirt on this tragic history with Menendez and clues them in about Solerium.
23:23The young bucks embark on a series of missions investigating Menendez and his massive mercenary army.
23:29The gang eavesdrops for intel about a cyber-weapon called Karma.
23:33Section Harper and Salazar search for it on the decadent floating city of Colossus, where they discover that Karma is actually Chloe Lynch,
23:40and that Menendez is trying to kill her to keep her quiet about the Solerium computer worm.
23:45Her fate has yet to be confirmed by Canon, but if they do save Karma from top henchman DeFalco, she uncovers Menendez's ultimate plan.
23:52On June 19th, Freedom Day, he's going to hijack the US military's drone system and unleash an electronic rumbling on every major city within both global superpowers.
24:03That's tomorrow.
24:05Oh my god. June 19th. That's... that's tomorrow.
24:10Over Section's objections, his commander, Admiral Briggs, decides it's high time to grab Menendez.
24:15They contact Farid, a deep cover operative, observing Menendez ignite a revolution in Yemen.
24:20Farid sacrifices himself to save Harper,
24:23and Menendez is easily captured, taken on board the aircraft carrier USS Barack Obama.
24:30Surprise! We were playing right into Menendez's brilliant ruse the entire time.
24:34It's the whole, getting caught was part of my plan gambit that was all the rage in the late aughts.
24:39Portis DA goons stormed the Obama, and Menendez seizes control of the ship with the help of his double agent, who are now ex-BFF Salazar.
24:47Today is a difficult day, Section.
24:50He uploads the virus and takes over the US military drone network before escaping.
24:54Since Cannon presumes you completed the bonus strike missions and took down Tianzhao,
24:59Chinese planes will save the ship and ally with JSOC against the drones, ending the Cold War for good.
25:05As thousands of metal death machines swarm upon populated cities, Section Harper, David Petraeus, and the President of the United States are shot down in a war-torn Los Angeles.
25:15Under siege by an army of killer drones, the men escort POTUS to safety in one of the most spectacular set pieces in a series that has a lot of them.
25:24JSOC and China trace the drone control signal to a Cordis DA facility in Haiti and stage a full-scale invasion.
25:35Menendez goes live when they arrive, but instead of destroying the world's cities, he blows up every single one of the drones instead, crippling American military infrastructure.
25:44Section finally captures his father's murderer and makes a martyr out of Menendez, which is exactly what he wanted.
25:50He posts a posthumous YouTube video instructing his billions of followers to take advantage of the drone-free power void and seize control of the United States.
26:01You know how to proceed.
26:03Treyarch has been pretty firm that the Menendez dies ending of Black Ops 2 is canonical, although his promised Cordis DA uprising fizzles out.
26:12Please, follow me.
26:15Call of Duty Black Ops 7 is set a decade after the end of BLOPS 2.
26:20Frank Woods has finally gone to that old soldier's home in the sky, and David Mason is still dorkily calling himself Section and leading a new team called Specter 1, with old faces like Harper and Marshall and new ones like the Bionic 50-50.
26:33The world is still shaken from the drone incident. The Guild has shed its shady beginnings and is reborn as a powerful tech giant offering protection in uncertain times.
26:41In 2035, the dead Menendez shocks the world with a prophecy and a threat.
26:46Your streets shall once again run red with your blood.
26:50He's presumably referring to a new fear-based MacGuffin that pushes minds to the edge of consciousness with typical Black Ops trippiness.
26:57It's a five minutes into the future setting, a touch more sci-fi than modern warfare, but closer to a tomorrow that seems just around the corner.
27:04It's not the first time that Black Ops has moved forward in the timeline, and it's nowhere close to the giant leap taken by Treyarch for Black Ops 3.
27:12Set in 2062, Black Ops 3 is the odd duck in an already pretty weird franchise.
27:21It depicts a surreal Philip K. Dickian future that's been forged in the fallout of Cordis DA's Drone War, where the old geopolitical order has collapsed and optimized into two bloated mega-factions locked in endless proxy wars.
27:34New technology makes air supremacy obsolete, mechs roam the battlefield, and wall-running super soldiers interface directly with the grid.
27:42Black Ops 3's campaign is ambitious and strange, but it feels less like the next chapter in the Black Ops saga and more of an optional epilogue, the kind of ending you'd reload a save to avoid.
27:53There's connective tissue to the larger mythos, but none of the classic characters or grudges survive the time skip.
27:59Also, blops being blops, most of the action turns out to be the digital experiences of a disembodied, dying consciousness inside a simulation.
28:07While there's no reason to doubt its canonicity, Black Ops 3 is not the focus of Black Ops 7.
28:13The latest title has far too much unfinished business in the past to linger in the far-flung future.
28:18Still, the slow drift towards sci-fi is undeniable, and it makes total sense.
28:23Black Ops has spent the last 15 years strip-mining the shadow wars of the 20th century,
28:28and there's really only one direction left to go.
28:30Will Black Ops lose its psycho wet-works swagger if it moves beyond the current day?
28:35Is there still more juice to squeeze from our clandestine past?
28:38Or is it time for Treyarch and Raven Software to invent something entirely new?
28:43After all, if we've learned anything from Call of Duty Black Ops, it's that identities are anything but permanent.
28:49Thanks for watching and let us know which Black Ops game has the best campaign.
28:53Do you appreciate the simplicity and the iconic interrogation of Black Ops 1?
28:57Do you like the split-story structure of Black Ops 2?
29:00Are you a huge fan of Perseus and Pantheons and everything else that they've cooked up over the years?
29:05Leave a comment, let us know, and stay tuned to IGN for all your Call of Duty needs.
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