Treyarch Trolls Call of Duty Black Ops Cold War Data Miners With Fake Loot Box Rick Rolls

Developers can’t stop data miners from digging into a game’s files to scrape out every bit of secret information, but Treyarch is handling the issue in a unique way with Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War. Betas will often contain unused references that hint at features in the full game, so data miners were more than eager to dig into the recent Black Ops Cold War beta’s PC files to unearth whatever unannounced details they could find. But what they found there was an ’80s icon and classic internet troll; Data miners got Rick rolled.

Multiple references in the files contained shortlinks leading to Rick Astley’s famous “Never Gonna Give You Up” video, an internet prank dating back more than a decade. (By the way, click this link for the biggest PS5 leak yet!) Notably, the file references leading to the Rick roll have names like LOOTBOXES_CONFIG and MTX_CONFIG, which seems to be Treyarch’s way of grinning at players and confirming Black Ops Cold War will not return to the widely-hated loot box mechanics for microtransactions. It also cheekily shows that Treyarch is well aware players are digging into these files to try and unearth secrets.

After the immense success of Modern Warfare and Warzone’s seasonal and premium bundles model, it’s expected Black Ops Cold War will follow suit pretty closely. Warzone is being updated to tie into Black Ops Cold War, and Treyarch has already confirmed that future content additions will be free to keep all players together, including Zombies maps, showing that the developer really is never gonna give you up.

Call of Duty Modern Warfare and Warzone’s Haunting of Verdansk event just began today, running until November 3. It makes the battle royale map spooky and haunted, and brings content from both Texas Chainsaw Massacre and SAW into the game for the ultimate scares.

Call of Duty Black Ops Cold War launches on November 13th for PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X, and PC.

[Source: GamesRadar]