News is starting to pick up regarding the 2024 title for Call of Duty, with the upcoming project reportedly being in the hands of veteran franchise studio Treyarch. Most of the current reports and rumors surrounding the game point towards the release being set during the Gulf War, with the title also being a part of the iconic Black Ops franchise.

More details about this year's Call of Duty are expected to come out in the near future, with an upcoming Xbox Showcase on June 9 supposedly focusing extensively on the release. While most of the current rumors surrounding the game focus on its setting and stage of development, a prominent supposed feature of CoD 2024 is that its single-player campaign will be entirely open-world. This particular rumor has already been met with a lot of controversy, but the freedom and scale of an open-world CoD campaign would have one key benefit that should not be overlooked.

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Easter Eggs Could Be a Staple of Call of Duty 2024's Open-World Campaign

While Call of Duty campaigns have always been known for their linearity and explosive set pieces, the franchise has begun expanding the scale of its single-player experiences in recent years. This is best evidenced in the campaign of the recent Modern Warfare 3, which featured several "open combat" missions that allowed players to explore much wider areas, completing objectives in their own order and pacing.

These open combat missions were one of the most controversial elements of Modern Warfare 3, making the reports of 2024's CoD featuring a fully open-world campaign an already divisive part of the upcoming project. However, this open-world formula for 2024's Call of Duty would give Treyarch a greater level of creative freedom, with things like Easter eggs potentially returning as a core part of exploration.

While rumored, it has not been officially confirmed that 2024's Call of Duty release will have an open-world campaign.

Treyarch Has an Easter Egg Track Record For Call of Duty

Interestingly, Treyarch already has a history with this sort of secret single-player content, with the campaign of 2008's World at War perhaps possessing the most well-known campaign Easter egg in CoD history. After walking over puddles in a specific order in the mission "Little Resistance," players could unlock the iconic Ray Gun from CoD Zombies to use throughout the rest of the mission.

A similar Easter egg was present in 2010's Black Ops, where players could unlock the Thundergun Wonder Weapon in the title's campaign. These kinds of Easter eggs were a fantastic way to stoke community discussion and encourage deeper exploration, but these campaign secrets have become much rarer in recent years.

With Treyarch being the pioneer of single-player Easter eggs in Call of Duty, the size of an open world would be perfect to bring these secrets back in a huge way. With the Black Ops franchise now being such a storied overall experience, there is a huge wealth of potential callbacks and references that can feature as Easter eggs throughout the map of 2024's Call of Duty release.

The size of the map could easily foster much more complex Easter eggs, the likes of which Treyarch is known for implementing in CoD Zombies, requiring multiple stages and extensive traveling to unlock but giving huge rewards to players who complete them. While the concept of an open-world Call of Duty campaign is not the most popular, it could reintroduce a deeper layer of gameplay and exploration that the franchise has not seen for some time.