Call of Duty Online might finally hit open beta late this year

Tencent and Activision’s joint shooter project Call of Duty Online has been, to put it lightly, troubled. The game, a free-to-play online version of Call of Duty aimed at the Chinese market, hit its first round of closed beta over a year ago, but the game still hasn’t emerged in public. In April, the game got shifted to a new development team, and in June, Raven said that the open beta was coming ASAP. But there still wasn’t a date.

Now, we finally have a tentative one: Netease Games is reporting the game may hit open beta late this year. If it does—and apparently that’s still a big if—that would mean Call of Duty Online took about a year and a half to reach open beta counting from the first closed beta, which is a bit concerning.

I’ll be honest: I’m pretty baffled at this point about what is taking so long. Aside from a robot zombies mode (pictured), virtually everything that has been shown about the game looks copied from previous mainstream COD titles. There are minor tweaks, but at the end of the day these are still COD-quality graphics using pre-existing weapons on pre-existing COD maps. Why is it taking so long for this game to even reach beta?