Call of Duty Leak Apparently Reveals Black Ops Title Planned for 2023

An Imgur album circulating online recently seems to have revealed the first look at a Call of Duty: Black Ops title in development for 2023.
An Imgur album circulating online recently seems to have revealed the first look at a Call of Duty: Black Ops title in development for 2023. / Image courtesy of Activision

An Imgur album circulating online recently seems to have revealed the first look at an upcoming Call of Duty: Black Ops title in development for 2023.

Despite being far and away from being officially announced by Activision and Treyarch, it appears Call of Duty fans can expect that following Vanguard and the rumored Modern Warfare 2 reboot, the Black Ops series will have its next chapter released.

On Dec. 29, a Reddit user who has since deleted their account posted to the r/GamingLeaksAndRumours subreddit showing what appears to be "the first leaked images of COD 2023."

"Take this with a massive bucket of salt because I have no idea who the original source is," the now-anonymous user wrote, "but the images do look pretty convincing. These were posted in a private Discord I’m in and apparently they’ve been spreading around certain circles for a few weeks now. I’ve tried asking around and I can’t seem to find a solid answer of where they originally came from.

"The game seems to be using 99% Cold War assets but that seems pretty typical for a COD alpha. Then again it could just be fake since stuff doesn't tend to leak this early. I would recommend archiving/downloading the images just in case they get DMCA’d. I guess time will tell if they’re legit."

The aforementioned Imgur album contains 12 apparently leaked cellphone photos of the in-development title, Blacks Ops T10. According to the Reddit user, this lines up with the method every Treyarch game is temporarily titled while in development and presumably makes sense for it to be COD 2023.

As pointed out by the initial poster and others in the comments, there are a lot of recycled assets from Black Ops Cold War, as well as placeholder assets and template UX, which would perhaps make sense considering these images are claimed to have been taken extremely early on into its development.

Perhaps the most interesting "leaked" detail is that of a design goal that says "return to "classic" Zombies," or another that details the "Faction Callings" system that was originally supposed to debut in Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 Zombies.