Black Ops 7’ Reveal Trailer Proves This Is A Direct Sequel To ‘Black Ops 2’

David Mason looks good for his age. The main protagonist of newly revealed Call Of Duty: Black Ops 7 should be 56 years-old in 2035 when the game takes place. In the trailer he looks closer to the age of the actor who plays him: Milo Ventimiglia (Heroes, This Is Us) is just 47.

Ventimiglia is joined by Michael Rooker (The Walking Dead) and Kiernan Shipka (Mad Men) for the upcoming first-person shooter, which is set over over 40 years after the events of Black Ops 6. This is a decade after Black Ops 2 and 40 years before the events of Black Ops 3. Clearly, this game franchise does not like chronological order. Maybe that makes it more of a sequel to Black Ops 2 than Black Ops 3 was. (Black Ops 4 didn’t have a campaign, so we won’t list that one here, but Black Ops Cold War was set in 1981 and the original Black Ops took place in the 1960s).

The fact that you play David Mason, son of Alex Mason who, along with Frank Woods, were the main characters in Black Ops 2, makes this feel even more like a direct sequel to that game. Adding to this feeling is the return of Raul Menendez, Nicaraguan drug lord and leader of the terrorist organization Cordis Die. In Black Ops 2, you play as David Mason and Frank Woods in the past timeline, and as David Mason in the present timeline. You have an option to kill or capture Menendez at the end of the game. His return in Black Ops 7 suggests that the “canon” version is his survival and, apparently, escape ten years later (though given how Black Ops stories work, he could just be a figment of Mason’s imagination).

Michael Rooker reprises his Black Ops 2 role of Mike Harper, making this even more credibly a direct sequel to that game. Kiernan Shipka will play Emma Kagan.

The trailer certainly paints a trippy picture of a high-tech near-future that veers into nightmare territory, as so many games in the Black Ops franchise tend to do, slipping between missions in the real-world and a psychedelic dream-world filled with demons and other nightmares. It’s one thing I really enjoy in this Call Of Duty sub-franchise.

There’s no word yet on whether futuristic gameplay is returning to Call Of Duty, but I hope we get double-jumping and wall-running. Activision overdid these features when they included versions of them in Advanced Warfare, Black Ops 3 and Infinite Warfare, but we’ve had “boots on the ground” for a long time now, and I’m very curious to see how these mechanics would feel alongside omni-movement, which was introduced in last year’s Black Ops 6.

We do know, however, that you can play solo or co-op in the game’s campaign, which was a feature included last in Black Ops 3. There are no hard details on how that will work or how many players will be able to team up yet, but we should find out more this summer.

On the multiplayer side, Activision and Treyarch promise “all-new maps” so this will not be a repeat of the Modern Warfare II / III debacle. MWIII released with all remastered maps from 2007’s Modern Warfare 2 (it gets confusing) and was met with backlash from gamers who thought it should be DLC rather than a new game. But that game proved to be quite good with major improvements to gunplay and movement over MWII, so in the end I disagreed with those claims. Still, I’m glad to see new maps rather than remasters and I hope they’re better than what we got at launch with Black Ops 6.

Mostly, I’m just glad we’re finally getting a proper Black Ops 3.