I’ve been on the Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 beat since it was first unveiled. I was able to play it months early when visiting Treyarch, I played it at Call of Duty NEXT, I played it during the beta weekends, and Screen Rant’s gaming team was provided early access to the game to prepare our review and other supporting content.
Throughout the preview and marketing phase of the game, which is described as the biggest Call of Duty ever, one of the notable features of Black Ops 7 is that it includes the most layers of progression in the franchise and is its most rewarding game to play. Part of this has to do with the title’s co-op campaign featuring progression for the player and their weapons. Part of it is new features including weapon prestiging, and part of it is in-mode progression like the overclock system in multiplayer or the combat rating system used for the game’s 32-player Endgame mode.
During the release weekend of Black Ops 7′s life, the title is already turning me away from its Endgame content. And this is coming from someone who gave the game a favorable review.
My issues began with the campaign, which is not good. While it supports weapon and player progression as a welcome and rewarding addition, it also features anti-player limitations due to its always-online requirement and lack of key quality of life features which were the norm in the earlier days of Call of Duty. For instance, players cannot pause the game during the campaign. And if they find a safe spot to hide to effectively pause, they will be kicked for inactivity and lose that progression. You cannot save and you cannot checkpoint.
If you don’t have a full squad of other players to take advantage of the co-op, or if you dare to play the Black Ops 7 campaign solo, you do not get AI allies. You are not fighting alongside anyone, despite what the story and its cutscenes will tell you. It’s disappointing and a step down from the Call of Duty campaigns of old. But it gets worse.
In the Endgame mode, which continues the story indefinitely as the live-service element of the campaign, 32 players are able to drop into sessions of PvE gameplay across the four zones of Avalon. It’s here where players can take in operators and level them up individually, while acquiring power that increases their Combat Rating. Each level of Combat Rating grants the player a binary choice of a buff to add, ranging from movement speed and the number of armor plates they carry, to reload speed and reducing fall damage. There’s a lot to do here and every 10 levels, they also get a universal damage increase, helping them battle the higher tier enemies in the more difficult zones.
Black Ops 7 Doesn’t Let You Rejoin or Recover Progress When It Disconnects You
Game crash? Server disconnect? Too bad, so sad.
It’s fun when it works, and I’ve been leveling up multiple operators and testing every area and every mission type. In zone 4, the most difficult area of the map, there’s a final boss fight. It’s the only thing I’ve yet to experience, and I was on my way there today with my one and only maxed out operator, with my party, and with many others on the server onboard with the plan. I even had my OBS setup to record and share with you! And then the game crashed…
Uh oh.
No problem, though. I can just rejoin, right? No.
Okay, well, the game must know I crashed, and it will give back my operator to try again, right? No.
My hours of progression were erased. My one max-level operator, my weapon levels, and my second weapon were all gone. My operator was reset to Combat Rating zero. My rocket launcher returned to level one, and my other weapon simply vanished.
Let’s try again. I team up with a friend, starting fresh, and we do our best to power level. Two hours in we hit, mid-fight, guess what happened? Not a game crash, but a server disconnect this time as you can see in the screenshot up top. Progress erased. Again.
In 2025, after almost two dozen mainline Call of Duty games and two previous open-world PvE modes (DMZ and Modern Warfare Zombies), Black Ops 7 still does not protect players from crashes, server errors, or mid-session disconnects. There is no reconnecting. There is no save state. There is no safety net of any kind to protect players and the time they put into the game.
What is meant to be meaningful, long-term progression becomes punishment the moment the game fails. Black Ops 7 essentially told me that if I want another shot at that boss fight, I need to redo my entire weekend of progress, and hope that it doesn’t disconnect me. Looking at responses on social media and Reddit, many players are experience similar issues, sometimes getting bugged out in the final boss battle or when extracting. It’s broken.
There are too many competing games for this to be acceptable. Battlefield 6 is entering its first season with strong buzz, Escape from Tarkov 1.0 has launched on Steam and is currently drawing more Twitch viewers than Black Ops 7, and Arc Raiders is receiving a warm reception. Players have options, and not much patience for unnecessary frustration.
Black Ops 7 just ruined my experience, which is a shame given how solid the core multiplayer is. I’ll return to the Endgame mode only when this is fixed.
