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.
Imagine tapping a Zelda icon on your iPhone and jumping straight into Hyrule. A new open-source project called nxnative makes that possible by repackaging Switch games you’ve bought into apps for iPhone, iPad, and Mac, with no emulator in the middle.
Why does this run so well on Apple devices?
The Call of Duty franchise has held a special place in my heart ever since I played my first Black Ops game back in 2010. That game's campaign was something else, with twists and turns that culminated in a mind-blowing finale. We can all admit that compared to those older campaigns, the recent CODs have been lackluster at best, and a complete and utter disappointment at worst. The reboot of Modern Warfare did give me some hope, as the first two installments were actually quite good, but the third game left such a bad taste in my mouth that I wasn’t exactly expecting much from Modern Warfare 4.
After recently finishing the campaign, I can say that this installment is nothing like the recent releases and instead feels closer to the franchise’s roots. For the first time in a long while, the campaign comes across as well-crafted rather than rushed to hit a release date. It arrives three years after MW3, and you can see exactly where all that time went. It seems the studio finally made listening to player feedback a priority.
Epic Games has just announced the 2026 Epic AI MegaJam, which is looking to see how much game development can be squeezed into a very short window. This is running from November 12 through November 15.
Participants can work alone or in teams of up to five people, build in Unreal Engine or Unreal Editor for Fortnite, and bring along “as many AI agents as you want.” Epic explicitly encourages coding agents, AI-generated assets, audio tools, writing tools, and other AI systems. The official event page literally says "Vibe your way to $50k.”