Two titans of the FPS genre are about to release on Xbox in the form of Battlefield 6 and Black Ops 7, but whilst BF6 drops last-gen support this time around, BO7 is still giving us an Xbox One version here in 2025 - and the teams both have their reasons as to why.
Recently, Call of Duty developer Treyarch spoke with Dexerto about the last-gen versions of Black Ops 7, admist concerns they could hold back the current-gen releases. Treyarch understands the concern, but senior director of production Yale Miller says that "a shocking number of people" still play the game on their eighth generation consoles.
"A shocking number of people play it, [...] It made sense for us to do it, and we could. There are straight-up, like, graphical features and things that you just won’t see, but we feel like that doesn’t necessarily break the experience. And, obviously, there’s performance and other things that are not gonna be as good, but that’s it. It’s just players,"
Whilst COD's enormous player base clearly still spreads across both generations of consoles, the situation is a little different with Battlefield. 2042 had last-gen versions but they were separated off from current-gen due to lower player counts - and ultimately, the team decided that it just wasn't worth clinging on to Xbox One this year.
In a new chat with PC Gamer, Battlefield 6 technical director Christian Buhl mentioned that ditching last-gen was a real "magic trick" in unlocking the game's potential:
"Maybe the only magic trick is that we're not on the PS4 or Xbox One any more, [...] So we've kind of raised the floor of what we have in terms of memory and CPU speed, and so obviously raising that floor helps with improving performance overall. Since we're not trying to get the game to run on a PS4, for example.
Other than [raising the floor] it's just a lot of work, [...] It's the testing, it's testing destruction, it's optimising different areas."
So there you have it, COD has its reasons for sticking with Xbox One (mainly a huge last-gen player base and less demanding tech) whilst BF6 reckons unlocking the game's true potential is partly due to a focus on more modern hardware. Two different approaches, then, and we're curious to see how the Call of Duty vs. Battlefield saga plays out this holiday season.