The Campaign mode of Black Ops Cold War was designed and developed by Raven Software which was already designing a campaign based on the Cold War before Treyarch took the project over. Nothing is ever as it seems in a gripping single-player Campaign, where players will come face-to-face with historical figures and hard truths, as they battle around the globe through iconic locations like East Berlin, Vietnam, Turkey, Soviet KGB headquarters and more." - description Campaign " Black Ops Cold War will drop fans into the depths of the Cold War’s volatile geopolitical battle of the early 1980s. On the next-gen platforms Black Ops Cold War is expected to support 4K resolution and 120 frame-per-second. The game would also showcase volumetric fog. The technologies included Real Time Lighting which allowed "the lighting to be adjusted in real time during development" as well as global illumination and ray-tracing. While sharing "underlying technology" with the revamped engine from Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, Black Ops Cold War used a different iteration of the IW Engine whose tools and technologies were created in 2015 starting with Call of Duty: Black Ops III and rebuilt "to be scalable and broad to work on future platforms". The two studios focused on different parts of the game Raven Software designed the Campaign mode while Treyarch developed its Multiplayer and Zombies modes. On August 4, 2020, Activision announced that Treyarch and Raven Software were co-developing the game which would be known as Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War.
In May 2019, it was reported that Treyarch would take over the Call of Duty 2020 project following tensions between Sledgehammer Games and Raven Software during the development of the game.