The new PlayStation port of 2010’s original Black Ops was supposed to be a celebration of one of Call of Duty’s most iconic games, but instead the game leaves a lasting impression of how little time, resources and expertise Activision chose to invest in this project.
Resolution numbers don’t tell the whole story, but they’re telling: the PS5 is a powerful package by the standards of a game that came out 16 years ago on PS3 and Xbox 360, so most modern games ported to the system run at full 4K resolution by default. Not so here, which comes out (in our Lord’s 2026!) at native 1080p resolution – and without any anti-aliasing.
This low resolution also doesn’t make for smooth 120fps output, since the game is capped at 60Hz. A 1080p60 presentation is potentially acceptable for the PS4 version – and it is! – but for a brand new PS5 conversion it’s disappointingly bad and well below what the hardware is capable of.
Surprisingly, the game is still better than the backwards-compatible Xbox version, which is limited to the 360-era 608p resolution, with lower-resolution shadow maps and a darker presentation – so no Xbox improvements are out of the question. But for a native PS5 game and a fairly high-profile port, this is a very strange state of affairs. Even the game’s obvious visual shortcomings remain: shadow quality was necessarily poor back then, but why continue that problem in this day and age when there are so many more graphics options available?
I could understand Microsoft’s Activision owners not wanting the game to look better on PS5 than it does on their own Series X console, giving a false impression of the relative power of the two systems, but the game still comes with a resolution advantage on the PlayStation. And if that were the case, surely the answer here would be to improve the backwards compatibility experience on Xbox or release Blops 1 as a paid “remaster” for the PS5 and Xbox Series consoles with minimal settings at full 4K resolution?
Another theory is that somewhere, someone took it upon themselves to bring Black Ops to PS5, but for some reason they had absolutely minimal resources to do so, so upgrading the resolution to modern standards fell out of the scope. Given the fact that PS5 releases are heavily promoted, this again seems unlikely, but I just can’t think of many good explanations for why the port would be released at such a low resolution on PS5. And if you think that a sequel will solve the problem, then no – it’s also 1080p.
In addition, questions about price must be raised. For such a lightweight port, the $40/£35 price tag is frankly astonishing, although a 50 percent discount is available if you’re a PlayStation Plus subscriber. On top of that, Activision is asking for another $30/£26 for the season pack, even though all the available content should have been combined into one release. If you have a PlayStation Plus subscription, the DLC is 67 percent off, but that’s still a very bad state of affairs – and the exact same prices are set for Black Ops 2 and its DLC.
It’s really not good enough. The original Black Ops and its sequel are famous games in the Call of Duty series. Reasonable updates at a reasonable price with all the content available as well as ports to the Xbox console is not much to ask for.
Will is an editor at Digital Foundry, specializing in PC hardware, racing simulators, and display technology.