If you were hoping Activision would give Call of Duty: Black Ops 1 and 2 the remaster treatment on PlayStation, the reality of these ports is going to sting. The PS4 and PS5 versions are now live, and the price tags are hard to ignore. At $40 per game, you are looking at $80 to own both, and that is before you factor in a single piece of DLC. For context, Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 launched as a full-price title with a complete feature set. These ports do not come close.
What $140 actually buys you
Here is the full cost breakdown if you want everything:
That $140 figure is not a misprint. The map packs, which were originally sold separately back when these games launched on Xbox 360 and PS3, are still sold separately here. Most modern re-releases bundle DLC in as standard. These do not.
PlayStation Plus members get a significant discount until August 6, dropping each game to around $20 and each season pass to roughly $10, bringing the full package to about $60. That is a much more reasonable number, but the discount window closes and the base pricing tells its own story.
1080p and not much else
Here is the thing: Activision confirmed before launch that these were ports, not remasters. Players knew going in that a visual overhaul was off the table. But the actual feature list is thinner than even that lowered bar suggested.
Neither game outputs at 4K. Neither offers a 120Hz framerate option. There is no FOV slider, no separate sensitivity settings, and no anti-aliasing. Both titles run at 1080p on PS4 and PS5, which is a step up from the Xbox 360 version's 608p resolution, but Xbox players have had that same 1080p output through backwards compatibility on Xbox One and Xbox Series X/S for years. The ports offer no improvements to shadows or visual fidelity beyond that resolution bump.
None of the quality-of-life features that have become standard in shooter games since 2010 made it in. The games play and look essentially as they did on last-generation hardware, just running natively on PS4 and PS5 instead of through an emulation layer.
The matchmaking question Activision finally answered
Because Activision kept communication minimal ahead of launch, players were left guessing about several features until they actually had the games in hand. Two questions dominated the conversation: whether PS4 and PS5 players could matchmake together, and whether buying the season pass would split you off into a separate player pool from those who skipped the DLC.
Activision clarified both points on X. PS4 and PS5 players can matchmake with each other. Season pass owners and non-owners can also matchmake together, meaning the DLC purchase does not strand you in a smaller pool. The exception is DLC maps themselves, where you will only match with other owners when those maps are in rotation. That is a sensible setup, and it mirrors how the original games handled the situation.
What it does not answer is whether the player population will be large enough to matter long-term, particularly for a pair of games that have been playable on Xbox through backwards compatibility for years.
The value question nobody has a clean answer to
The PS Plus discount makes the $60 all-in price genuinely competitive for two classic Call of Duty titles with functioning multiplayer. At full price, $140 for ports that run at 1080p with no modern feature additions is a much harder sell.
For PlayStation players who have never had access to these games and want to revisit the Treyarch era, the discount window is the obvious entry point. Miss that window, and the math gets uncomfortable fast. If you want to sharpen up for the current game, the Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 guides are a better use of your time and money right now.
