After more than a decade of waiting, Call of Duty: Black Ops and its sequel, Black Ops 2, will finally be available on Sony’s latest and previous-generation consoles. The announcement, which surprised the gaming community, confirms that both titles—originally released in 2010 and 2012—will debut on PS4 and PS5 next July, with studio Iron Galaxy Studios handling the adaptation.
These ports won’t be limited to the single-player campaign; they will also include multiplayer and Zombies modes, which is a draw for both veterans looking to relive the experience and new users wanting to discover them on modern platforms.
The question many are asking is why this release has taken so long. The explanation is simpler than it seems: the lack of backward compatibility between the PS3 and its successors. While the PS4 and PS5 use AMD processors with x86-64 architecture (similar to that of a conventional PC), the PS3 used a proprietary chip called the Cell Broadband Engine, whose structure and resource management were radically different.
This technical difference made it unfeasible to run PS3 games directly on the newer machines. Although emulation was a theoretical alternative, developers ruled out this option due to its high cost and uncertainty about performance. That is why no official re-release had been considered until now.
For now, Treyarch has not specified the exact release date within July, nor have they revealed the price of these ports. We’ll have to wait for further announcements to learn all the details.
ForAllTechNews
Image credit: By Flickr / CC BY 2.0 / Attribution 2.0 Generic