Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 was officially announced during the 2025 Xbox Games Showcase, but there’s still a lot we don’t know about this year’s premium COD title. The 3-minute teaser trailer that debuted the game’s title and premise, however, may have been hiding a lot more secrets than originally thought.
A recent Call of Duty Podcast featured a brief interview with Treyarch associate creative director Miles Leslie. Leslie took the opportunity to confirm some of what we know about Black Ops 7 and to share that there are still details lurking within the frames of the teaser that the community has yet to pick up on.
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The opening of The Guild doors
Doors are an everyday object that we might gloss over in most games. For the Black Ops series, though, doors have had hidden meanings. In Black Ops Cold War, the player character — Bell — has the option to ignore Russel Adler’s orders and go through a red bunker door, where they discover the truth about the mission.
Black Ops campaigns have served as portals to flashbacks and as cover for intel, brainwashing, and torture tactics. Red doors even showed up in Warzone during Call of Duty’s Cold War era, leading to hidden bunkers.
Which is why it’s important that the teaser trailer kicked off with the door to The Guild opening up. The Guild’s door is frosted glass, giving the illusion of transparency while actually obfuscating what is actually on the other side.
The Guild emblem, a shield, symbolizes the themes of protection and security that the returning faction wants the world to perceive them as providing.
Everything about The Guild’s office that we see in the trailer is pristine and manicured. Large, bright, open rooms with carefully manicured organic plant walls frame the perfectly shiny robot guide. The guide appears to be an early version of the General Purpose Infantry Unit, or “Grunts,” that were present in Black Ops 3.
The Guild is engaging in some heavy PR
The Guild is not the good guys, but they want you to believe they are. In the teaser for Black Ops 7, the Guild’s guide robot explains that the bipedal machines are designed to save lives.
Images of the grunt robots flash across the screen in the background, showing the machines engaging in first aid and emergency food distribution. But this is Black Ops, and if 6 taught us anything, well — the truth lies.
What The Guild is actually known for is smuggling weapons, supplying criminal organizations, and training deadly assassins. A large chunk of what we know about The Guild stems from the mercenary assassin Sevati “Sev” Dumas, who was trained by The Guild and then duped by them into murdering her lover.
Dumas ultimately betrays The Guild and joins the Rogue Black Ops after being recruited by Adler.
That was in the 90s, though, and The Guild we see in the BO7 teaser is set in 2035. There’s clearly been a significant effort to clean up The Guild’s image.
The Chilling Adventures of Emma Kagan
When David Mason enters The Guild, he is given a guided tour of The Guild’s office, complete with what seems to be a pre-recorded speech from a hologram of the CEO, Emma Kagan.
What you might’ve missed is that Emma Kagan is voiced by Kiernan Shipka from Netflix’s Chilling Adventures of Sabrina series, where she was the titular witch, Sabrina.
During the COD POD, Leslie also pointed to another commonly missed element of the teaser: The robot acknowledges the hologram of Kagan with a nod, as though it is revering its creator. “He’s talking to his maker. He’s presenting Emma,” Leslie said during the show, “we wanted to demonstrate that and not feel too mechanical.”
Leslie describes the character of Emma Kagan as a prodigy, saying that she went to MIT at 16 and when it comes to computational economics and robots, “This is her world.”
Kagan’s reveal drums up considerably more questions than it answers, however. Later in the trailer, we see the red butterfly glitch through the hologram of Kagan, implying things may not be exactly as they seem here.
We also see Kagan’s hologram staring at Mason as his grip on reality is shaken, while the robot in the room seems oblivious to what is occurring.
The color red
Speaking of shaken realities, the color red is making one hell of a comeback for Black Ops 7. I previously mentioned the red bunker doors in previous Black Ops titles, and red has held an ominous presence in the series as it symbolized the brainwashing and torture tactics that were recurring themes.
We see red right away in the trailer, with the butterfly, which is clearly meant to signal Mason’s mental health is on shaky ground.
The red you might have missed, however, appears during the sequence when the butterfly lands on a LCD screen during Kagan’s monologue. “I haven’t seen people call it out. Here, the cracks are turning red,” said Leslie. “It’s a small thing. A small detail you might miss, but that’s important.”
The use of the color red to signify that reality was not what it may seem appears multiple times in the Black Ops 7 trailer, including on the interrogation room screens seen in the original Black Ops all those years ago.
Leslie considers the returning themes as ingredients to the overall Black Ops experience. “You’re using those ingredients in really fun ways, and the team has had a lot of fun building BO7 and BO6 together.”
While 6 and 7’s tandem releases are a new approach for the Black Ops series, the complex timeline has long been a staple. Black Ops 6 takes place following the events of Black Ops 2, but prior to the events of Black Ops 3 and 4.
Black Ops 7 will fit into that timeline, as well, but where BO6 was focused on the events of the 90s, BO7 will jump significantly ahead. This timeline scatter allows the team to pull past and future Black Ops together into a more coherent timeline and tie up some loose threads left behind by the previous games.
Raul Menendez’s status is technically unknown
With the release of the Black Ops 7 trailer, the Call of Duty team hinted that David Mason would be facing a mysterious and terrifying adversary. The trailer shows Raul Menendez, a classic Call of Duty villain who has been responsible for an insane amount of debauchery — including tricking Frank Woods into killing David’s father, Alex Mason.
But Menendez was killed in Black Ops 2. Or, he was, depending on what choices you made in that game’s semi-open world with branching narrative plots. The teams at Treyarch and Raven Software have stopped short of declaring Menendez canonically dead, despite having done so for other Black Ops characters.
The villain’s return is drenched in red details as he smashes the delicate little butterfly in his hands. So at this time, we still don’t know if he is actually alive in Black Ops 7 or if he’s a tumultuous figment of Mason’s imagination as a result of brainwashing.
The whispers, Mason. What do they mean!?
One notable detail of the trailer that was easily overlooked is the inclusion of the whispers. Leslie confirms for sure that the whispers are both Menendez and Mason, but he stops short of confirming who is speaking each specific line, and whether they are talking to themselves, each other, or someone else.
The chaos of the whispers further drills in the state of Mason’s mind, and the psychological twists and turns that we can expect when Black Ops 7 launches. This is further drilled home with the sequence we see in the trailer, where David emerges from an inverted shipping container.
The point of view is skewed, and we’re unsure whether we’re experiencing the events as Mason or witnessing Mason’s experience as a third party. While Leslie did confirm that the cityscape we see in the trailer is Japan, he stops short of digging into any further significance.
Musical memories
Rock fans probably recognized the guitar riff from Nine Inch Nails’ “The Hand that Feeds” (2005) when it hit during the Black Ops 7 trailer. Treyarch and Raven Software are no strangers to leaning into rock songs for Black Ops, having previously used The Prodigy’s “Firestarter” and “Paint it Black” by the Rolling Stones.
Falling back on Nine Inch Nails was significant, though, as it harked back to the theme song for Black Ops 2, which was composed by NIN frontman Trent Reznor.
Reznor’s theme song also appeared in the Black Ops 7 trailer, played on piano, when we see the interrogation room with David Mason. Leslie reiterates that while Mason did not experience the interrogation room first hand, he may have encountered stories of what occurred there either from CIA reports or from “Uncle Woods.”
He may actually be manifesting these memories, as the red screens and butterfly indicate he may not be experiencing reality.
The truth lies, but so does the rumor mill
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There has been rampant community speculation of what Black Ops 7 could be when it finally launches later this year. Activision and the development team, now fully under Xbox, haven’t helped things by being much more secretive about Black Ops 7 than they were with the game’s predecessor.
This has fueled theories that Black Ops 7 could just be an expansion — similar to the rumors that went around prior to the release of Modern Warfare 3, just one year after Modern Warfare 2.
The lack of a Call of Duty direct following the Xbox Games Showcase for this year didn’t help matters. The team has confirmed, however, that Black Ops 7 is a full premium release title, with classic multiplayer and Warzone components.
We’ve also seen teasers that Zombies’ Dark Aether storyline is continuing this year alongside the full campaign. Other rumors, such as the potential inclusion of wall-running or jetpacks, have been debunked by Leslie in follow-up interviews.
The Call of Duty team has teased that we will see more of Black Ops 7 “later this summer,” which means it’s very likely that more thorough information for the game will not release until this year’s Call of Duty: NEXT event goes live.
In the past, COD: NEXT has taken place in late August, early September, and even as late in the year as early October. No date for Call of Duty: NEXT 2025 has been confirmed at this time.
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