It’s official, the next Call of Duty title is called Call of Duty Black Ops: Cold War!
After months of fan speculation, the next CoD title is said to be “inspired” by actual events.
Cold War
Call of Duty: Warzone may have overshadowed other titles in the Call of Duty franchise, with the Battle Royale title amassing up to 75 million downloads for this month— but Activision still wants to push forward with a new flagship Call of Duty campaign:
Black Ops Cold War.
The official YouTube teaser video for the game leaves players and CoD fans with many questions in mind.
It is made up entirely of newsreels and historical footage, likely setting up the scene for the game’s heavy plot. It plays on the Cold War intrigue, and introduces a Soviet spy codenamed Perseus.
The game’s tagline is listed in the video’s description:
“Know your history, or be doomed to repeat it.”
Inspired by real-life events
The next CoD title promises that it will be “inspired by actual events,” with the teaser video featuring a speech by a real KGB defector to help illustrate its authenticity.
The defector, Yuri Bezmenov, describes the slow and cautious ways that the Soviet Union was working to undermine the United States. Apparently, the Soviet Union had a careful, decades-long plan to infiltrate and destabilize the USA.
A former Soviet journalist, Bezmenov became a prominent anti-communist author and speaker in the west after his defection.
“It’s a slow process which we called active measures,”
He further explains that there are four stages to this plan which will eventually lead to Normalization, described as “what will happen in the United States if you allow all the schmucks to put a Big Brother government in Washington D.C. who will promise loads of things, no matter whether the promises were fulfilled or not.”
He ends the teaser with a strong warning, “the time bomb is ticking. With every second the disaster is coming closer and closer. The danger is real.”
Amid his narration, flashes of everything from the Vietnam War, civil rights protests, government meetings, and speeches given by Ronald Reagan were shown in the video.
From the text snippets that flash in the teaser video, players may be able to play— or interact with— an alleged Soviet spy codenamed “Perseus.”
Perseus’ goal is to “subvert the U.S. to ensure Soviet dominance in the arms race.”
The CIA has published at least one article about someone named “Perseus” as well, who was allegedly among the spies that stole USA nuclear secrets from the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos.
It would seem that these events happened during World War II, though.
Full details for the game’s reveal will be on August 26th.
There isn’t much to speculate regarding Cold War, but its YouTube description mentions the name “Verdansk,” which happens to be the location of Warzone’s primary map. It was also featured in Modern Warfare.
Warzone tie-in?
Previously, Activision confirmed that Warzone will be tied to other future games in the Call of Duty franchise. There might be a great chance that the title will be tied with Cold War:
Polygon already pointed out that there was an ARG leading up to the teaser:
“The teaser’s release was timed with members of the Call of Duty community completing a multi-day ARG that involved various forms of Cold War-style code breaking, which led them to secret rooms inside the Verdansk map in Call of Duty: Warzone — which seems to imply there could be a connection between Black Ops: Cold War and Warzone. The ARG also included a variety of video tapes, each corresponding to a year in Cold War history, with similar clips to the ones in this teaser.”
The new CoD title will be developed by Treyarch and Raven Software.
Raven specifically confirmed that it was working on “this year’s Call of Duty”— giving the community an idea that CoD: Cold War may launch before the end of 2020.
