Call of Duty: Black Ops 7

Within a future world of new technological capabilities, the game’s protagonists receive their objectives around a Holo-table. Key intentions, milestones and targets are highlighted for the mission to come. Inspired by the premise of a digital 3-Dimensional microfiche, our approach was to create an abstract environment that immersed the player in the centre of the mission briefing mainframe, where layer upon layer of information could be presented from any possible angle and viewed from any potential perspective. This gave us a vehicle for transporting the player through each mission briefing – tying visual tropes to each audible objective, in a style befitting of a future era.

Maps and locations play a pivitol role for the narrative and gameplay in Call of Duty games,not least in their latest installment. For Black Ops 7 we established geographical landscapes through a combination of digitised topography lines and crystaline relief forms. This gave usa unique duality between the tactile physical nature of glass, and the mercurial and abstract intangibility of iridescence and digital pixels. Including recognisable ingredients such as ASCII and subtle FR-4 circuit inspired textures, gave our visuals a familiar digital grounding, whilst maintaining a future-forward tone.

Within the mainframe briefings, we needed to represent targets, enemies and persons of interest in multiple ways. Whether as a digtal wireframe construct, a holographic projection or a futursitic dossier, each character and moment felt connected whilst leveraging its own unique personality and presence.

The Cradle is a chemical weapon, a hallucinogenic toxin released by The Guild to Avalon to incapacitate their enemies, and to create a “Quarantine Zone,” which they then “police” with their robots. In depicting ‘The Cradle’ we employ a really strong contrast colour (red) to signal the move from digital to bio.