How to join the Black Ops 7 beta

By Jesse Lennox Published August 31, 2025

2025 has been a huge year for open betas. Battlefield 6‘s beta managed to break all kinds of records and set itself up to be one of the best entries yet, but it mainly put the pressure on Black Ops 7 to step up its game. Both will be cross-platform games, so there’s no advantage one way or another there, so it will all come down to quality. The former’s betas are all done, but now it’s Call of Duty’s turn to host its open betas. While it is an open beta, meaning anyone can participate, but those who are willing to jump through one small hoop can access the beta even earlier than the general public. I’ll break it all down for you so you and your friends can be ready to jump into the Black Ops 7 open beta as soon as it launches.

There are no restrictions to joining the Black Ops 7 open beta. Anyone with either a PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S, or PC with the proper specs can download and join the beta as soon as it launches. However, Activision is giving special early beta access for those who preorder Black Ops 7.

Black Ops 7 offers a standard/cross-gen or Vault edition for preorder, with the former costing the standard $70 and the latter costing $100. Both will grant you early beta access, but the Vault addition includes the following extras:

But you may not even need to preorder to get early access. Since Xbox owns Activision, thus owns Call of Duty, those who are subscribed to Game Pass at the Ultimate, PC, or Console tier can access the early beta without preordering.

The Black Ops 7 open beta is split into two chunks, depending on whether you have early access or not.

Those who preorder or have the appropriate Game Pass subscription can start playing first on October 2 at 10 am PT, with that period closing on October 5 at 10 am PT.

The true open beta will start immediately after the early access period ends on October 5 at 10 am PT and will close on October 8 at 10 am PT.

At most, that’s only 6 days to test out everything Black Ops 7 has to offer so mark your calendars to make the most of it.