Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 devs say that you can blame the Black Ops timeline for the wall jump not being a wall run: “Black Ops 2 really gave us a foundation for the technology available”

Black Ops 7 screenshot showing the returning characters from Black Ops 2 — (Image credit: Activision)

If you've been playing the Black Ops 7 beta, you've probably noticed a couple of key changes to Omnimovement. The advanced movement system was introduced in Black Ops 6, affording you the opportunity to sprint, dive, and slide in any direction. Developer Treyarch has made some key tweaks for the 2025 instalment, improving base movement speed at the cost of Tac-Sprint and removing the ability to ADS while jumping and sliding by default (these systems are now activated as Perks).

Outside of changes, Treyarch has introduced one primary enhanced movement ability in Black Ops 7: the wall jump. You can now kick off from vertical surfaces, chaining up-to three jumps in sequence. Some of you may be wondering why this wall jump isn't a wall run. Well, associate creative director Miles Leslie tells me that you can blame Black Ops 2 and Black Ops 3 for that.

"When we started development of Black Ops 7, we knew we wanted to pick up threads from Black Ops 2. Since we knew we were going back into that timeline, Black Ops 2 really gave us a foundation for the technology available."

Black Ops 7 is set in 2035. That leaves it sandwiched between Black Ops 2 (2025) and Black Ops 3 (2065). As a result, Treyarch says it had clear boundaries when it started to consider how to push Omnimovement.

"We are really precious to our own canon, we have to respect that. So that meant we couldn't have Thrust Jump, because the tech didn't exist in 2035," Leslie says. "Wall running made sense when we were further in the future but, with our return to the Black Ops 2 era, that world just didn't have that sort of technology so it made sense not to do it."

Call of Duty Black Ops 7 screenshot — (Image credit: Activision)

Wall Jump does introduce a degree of verticality that wasn't present in Black Ops 6. Chaining movement unlocks new ways to traverse a map, not to mention open up alternative flanking routes – particularly handy in objective-based multiplayer games like Domination and Hardpoint.

Still, Leslie says that Treyarch has taken some key learnings from the advanced movement systems of Black Ops 3 as it considered the impact of the modest Wall Jump In Black Ops 7. "You can get so much higher now with the Wall Jump, so we took a lot of learnings from everything we did on Black Ops 3 – it was really important that we kept the combat in-frame," he says, noting the loss in inertia between each chained jump, which not only helps maintain some degree of momentum balance but also quickly brings combat back to ground level.

Dive deep into this year's Call of Duty with our Big Preview of Black Ops 7. To start, read our interviews with Treyarch to learn how the studio is trying to redefine what Call of Duty can be.

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Josh West is Editor-in-Chief of GamesRadar+. He has over 18 years of experience in both online and print journalism, and was awarded a BA (Hons) in Journalism and Feature Writing. Josh has contributed to world-leading gaming, entertainment, tech, music, and comics brands, including games™, Edge, Retro Gamer, SFX, 3D Artist, Metal Hammer, and Newsarama. In addition, Josh has edited and written books for Hachette and Scholastic, and worked across the Future Games Show as an Assistant Producer. He specializes in video games and entertainment coverage, and has provided expert comment for outlets like the BBC and ITV. In his spare time, Josh likes to play FPS games and RPGs, practice the bass guitar, and reminisce about the film and TV sets he worked on as a child actor.

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