Leaked files for a complicated ARG that revealed the game's content and setting. A brief teaser awaited fans at the end of this cryptic challenge, with a full reveal set to arrive on August 26th.
The impending arrival of next-gen consoles is a complicated thing for a lot of game developers. No one wants their game to arrive only on old consoles right as people are flocking to the new ones, so a lot of games coming out in the following months are targeting a release on both generations. This transition is tricky from a lot of different perspectives, including marketing. Many games are offering free upgrades, letting players who buy games on Xbox One or PS4 switch to Xbox Series X and PS5 once they get one, carrying over their progress and still enjoying all the upgrades that the next generation brings. Some games, like giving all players the upgrade for free.
It looks like Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War will follow Control's example. A recent dive into the game files of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare revealed preorder information for the title, which has since been shared on Twitter by available for preorder: the standard edition, the ultimate edition, and something called the "Cross-Gen Bundle." The existence of this bundle suggests that players who get the game before the advent of the next generation will be stuck on the old consoles unless they shill out extra money for the upgrade. Since this is just a leak, further information on what the bundle entails hasn't been revealed.
This is not great news for Call of Duty fans. The necessity of paying for the next-gen upgrade feels like a shallow cash-grab from a publisher as well-off as Activision, especially when compared to all the other titles that are offering it for nothing. This could have severe repercussions for the game's multiplayer as well, which has long been a staple of the Call of Duty experience. It's unclear how online multiplayer between generations will be handled, and if players are barred from accessing the next generation simply because they didn't want to give extra money to Activision, that could severely disrupt the cohesion of the multiplayer experience. This is all speculation, of course, and like any leak, there's a possibility that it's entirely fake.
The transition between console generations is never clean, and there's always a lot that's up in the air. Leaks like this one are hard to rely on for information about how developers are bridging the generation gap, and players should always be cautious about where they're getting their information. As of right now, there is no official information about what preorder versions of the new Call of Duty game will look like. These leaks look about as trustworthy as leaks can get, and they come with pretty bad news for Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War.
Source: BKTOOR/Twitter
