Black Ops 7 Has Problems, But Call Of Duty Recognizes Where The...

FOV 90: Call of Duty's "minimal SBMM" experiment makes a good impression.

Welcome to FOV 90, an FPS column from staff writer Morgan Park. Every week, I'll be covering a topic relevant to first-person shooter enjoyers, spanning everything from multiplayer and singleplayer to the old and the new.

My first night with Black Ops 7 went as well as expected. After scoping out the first few missions of the bizarre co-op campaign with friends, we hopped into 6v6 multiplayer, making a point to stick to the "open" playlists with "minimal" skill-based matchmaking.

As I feared after the open beta, Black Ops 7 is shaping up to be another weak year for Call of Duty multiplayer, shining a light on the series' streak of diminishing returns. Much like Modern Warfare 3 (2023) to Modern Warfare 2 (2022), Blops 7 is very much an expensive expansion for Blops 6: Guns now have sci-fi greebling and Titanfall angles, but behave the same as last year. Its big movement "innovation," the wall bounce, is barely there. Maps are plentiful and pretty, but remain in a structural rut so predictable in 2025 that you don't really need to play them to know their layout (it's almost always a box with three lanes).

Blops 7 is giving me every reason to hang it up early and return to Battlefield 6, except I've been successfully charmed by two things it does well: Loose skill-based matchmaking, and persistent lobbies.

I used to think the "anti-SBMM" crowd in Call of Duty was simply YouTubers and streamers advocating for a matchmaking algorithm that favors their own high skill. That is absolutely part of it, but there's a real argument to be made for the variety of random placement. After a three-hour session last night, Call of Duty's new low-SBMM initiative is, surprisingly, fine. Good, even.

A few matches were total stomps one way or the other, but most were fairly close, and interestingly, the presence of super sweaty players was unusually low—you can always identify them because they're never playing the objective but they are habitually sliding around corners and using the most hideous gun skins you'll ever see.

It took returning to older server-based shooters like Team Fortress 2 earlier this year to remind me that the FPS felt more casual before SBMM took over in the 2010s. When you only group together players who play like you, you end up with matches that feel exactly the same. Under the looser grip of Blops 7, matches were less predictable and consistently chill.

If open matchmak

Source: PC Gamer