Call of Duty: Black Ops - Cold War art is surprisingly bright and colorful

Activision finally confirmed yesterday that the next game in the Call of Duty series is, as we've long known, Call of Duty: Black Ops – Cold War. That's all it confirmed at the time, unfortunately, as the full reveal won't happen until next week. But the teasing isn't finished just yet.

Today developer Treyarch dropped some key art from the game, and it's a pretty big departure from what we've come to expect. The rugged, square-jawed soldiers are still there, but the eye-catcher is how colorful and almost cheery it all is, courtesy of all the propaganda imagery—Soviet on the left, American on the right—that actually makes up the uniforms and the borders surrounding them.

That all fits with the motif of the teases we've seen so far, which have focused on the subterfuge, propaganda, and back-room maneuvering that fueled the Cold War. That theme was expressed most explicitly in a teaser released along with yesterday's title confirmation, built around a real-world interview with Soviet defector Yuri Bezmenov in which he discussed the Soviet strategy of subverting Western domination through a process of "demoralization, destabilization, crisis, and normalization."

How large men with guns fit into that equation isn't clear yet, but an earlier ARG hinted that it could somehow involved the Cold War-adjacent conflict between China and India in the early 1960s. We'll find out soon enough: The worldwide reveal of Call of Duty: Black Ops – Cold War is set to take place on August 26.

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