As with this year’s installment, it appears that CoD 2020 might borrow a familiar series name for its title: Call of Duty: Black Ops. Whether this title, like this year’s Call of Duty Modern Warfare, is a soft reboot of the subseries or not remains to be seen.
The information comes from YouTuber TheLongSensation (via Polygon). The LongSensation released the information on Twitter last week, which can be seen below.
They claim that another title, Call of Duty: Black Ops V, is also being considered for 2020’s entry in the popular FPS franchise.
While there has been no confirmation that next year’s Call of Duty will carry the Black Ops moniker, it has been long rumored that it will. What’s more, TheLongSensation previously said that 2019’s Call of Duty would carry the Modern Warfare name, which was later corroborated by Kotaku’s Jason Schreier.
Now, as we well know, both were correct.
TheLongSensation also recently said that a Call of Duty battle royale mode will release in 2020; these claims come as Activision and Infinity Ward cryptically dance around the subject.
Whatever the next game in the series might be called, the game is being developed by Treyarch instead of Raven Software and Sledgehammer Games, following an alleged dispute between the two developers.
The game is said to be set during the Cold War, spanning 40 years of conflict that will include Vietnam and Korea. Only the original Black Ops was set during the Cold War. However, the first game, which originally released in 2010, spans only seven years of the conflict.
According to TheLongSensation, CoD 2020 will be “more gritty and gruesome than Modern Warfare,” although it’s unclear exactly what that means. Modern Warfare is reportedly one of the most visceral games in the franchise, at least on par with the “No Russian” mission in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2.
Based on what we know about the Modern Warfare soft reboot, CoD 2020 will have to go to grim lengths to do that.
Although the game doesn’t release until October for PC, PS4, and Xbox One, it has already come under fire for its inclusion of white phosphorous in the game’s multiplayer mode, a devastating weapon of war, while others have questioned how the team chooses which horrors of war to show and not show the player.