Activision promised Call Of Duty: Black Ops 7 wouldn’t keep adding random crossover skins, and yet it’s just announced Nicolas Cage as himself.
For several years, one of the most consistent and loudest complaints from Call Of Duty fans, was over the series’ increasingly ridiculous crossover skins, which were no doubt an effort to emulate the success of Fortnite.
Battlefield 6 even took a couple of potshots at Call Of Duty’s overuse of celebrity cameos last year, although not until after Activision acknowledged the fan discontent with how it had ‘drifted from what made Call Of Duty unique in the first place.’
It subsequently promised that the then upcoming Black Ops 7 would feel ‘authentic’ and yet here is Activision adding Nicolas Cage to the game.
The collab was announced as part of Black Ops 7’s mid-season update, which goes live on June 25, and at first we assumed it was meant to be a crossover with one of Cage’s action movies like Con Air or The Rock.
But no, it’s just Cage as himself and none of the associated unlocks in the new season pass featured on Activision’s website appear to be related to his movies either – not even The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent, where he plays himself.
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Activision was supposed to have stopped with the random celebrity cameos, given its comments last year, but it looks like the company was only ruling out certain types of crossover skins, rather than considering a full blanket ban.
In fact, Black Ops 7 has been indulging in crossovers for the past six months, albeit not to such an obnoxious degree. At the beginning of the year, it added Fallout skins based on the Amazon TV show, to coincide with the release of its second season.
That one was slightly more acceptable, since both franchises are owned by Microsoft and Fallout. Plus, their aesthetics don’t jarringly clash with one another, unlike when Activision added cartoon characters like Beavis and Butthead to Black Ops 6.
During Black Ops 7’s third season, though, Activision added RoboCop, actor Terry Crews, and Sir Smoka Lot – David Chappelle’s character from the 1998 stoner comedy Half Baked.
RoboCop at least fits as an action movie character and Crews, though just appearing as himself, also starred in ads promoting Black Ops 7. But who was demanding that Call Of Duty add a Half Baked character, especially for a game set in the distant future.
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Black Ops 6 had a string of stoner themed updates that added Jay and Silent Bob plus Seth Rogen as skins, but those were the sort of inauthentic skins that fans wanted less of, since they didn’t line up with Call Of Duty’s military aesthetic.
All this begs the question of what Activision considers as ‘authentic’ to Black Ops 7. So far, it just seems to mean no more cartoon characters, although while it’s a bit weird that Cage and Crews were added as themselves, they do at least have action movie credentials.
This makes them more natural fits than, say, musicians like Nicki Minaj or footballers like Lionel Messi. In fact, it was around the time skins like those were being added, in 2023, that Call Of Duty’s crossover problems became exacerbated and general opinion on the franchise began to sour.
These problems coincided with the release of Modern Warfare 3, a very obvious DLC expansion that was awkwardly ballooned into a sequel and became the most reviled entry in the franchise, up until that point.
Things bounced back a bit with Black Ops 6 but Black Ops 7 was such a disaster that Activision has sworn to never do back-to-back Black Ops or Modern Warfare sequels again.
This year’s Call Of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 will have been too far into development for Activision to react to Black Ops 7’s failings, which means Activision should be trying to do everything to placate fans until real change can materialise. But releasing goofy celebrity skins is only likely to upset players further.
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