Fans found something in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2’s latest Raid that hints at connections to Call of Duty: Black Ops.
Could this actually lead to something? We don’t know quite yet. But first let’s talk about what the hint was
In the Season 2 Raid, Captain Price, Farah, and Gaz follow through on the story from Season 1’s Atomgrad. They are at a ballistics base, and have to ‘identify and acquire an attached payload.’ While it’s wild that the same characters would be doing it again, there is some verisimilitude in thinking these soldiers were assigned to another such high level mission.
As reported by Comic Book, the unusual find was when players found that there were barrels of Nova 6 in the ballistics base. Nova 6 is a major plot point / MacGuffin in the Black Ops storyline, so its existence in the Modern Warfare continuity is the stuff of cliffhangers.
In the original Call of Duty: Black Ops, Nova 6 is a chemical weapon that dates back to World War 2. Yes, that means it’s also tied to the original Call of Duty games. It would be seized by the Soviets, who would develop the weapons themselves.
Jumping to Call of Duty: Black Ops 3, Nova 6 is once again being manufactured, but this time under a black CIA project. The CIA clearly made a mistake, as this leads to a major accident that kills thousands in Singapore.
In the Call of Duty games, Nova 6 is an agent of chaos, that only causes pain and destruction everywhere it is used. It literally has associations to the Nazis.
Now, the reason the Call of Duty franchise has two distinct continuities is quite simple. Infinity Ward and Treyarch were both originally tapped to make military shooters in the World War 2 setting, but when Activision shifted focus to tell stories about modern wars, that expanded the possibilities of what stories could be told.
Furthermore, Infinity Ward and Treyarch were mostly making their games independently. This arrangement would allow them to make the best games they could make, and also the freedom to tell their own stories.
What further complicates matters is that Modern Warfare’s reboot is just as much a reboot of the storyline as it is of the game franchise as a whole.
This might just be an Easter egg in the end, but there’s a lot of interesting possibilities with Activision tying together their current Modern Warfare continuity with the existing Black Ops continuity. Since they are completely different characters who lived in different time zones, they can even make this canon. If Activision has such ambitions, we may find out in the upcoming seasons of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2.
