How to Install Call of Duty: Black Ops and Join a Server

Call of Duty: Black Ops arrived on PC in 2010 carrying an apology.

The year before, Modern Warfare 2 had shipped without dedicated servers. No server browser, no community-run machines, no custom rules — everything went through a matchmaking system that put you on somebody's home connection and called it hosting. PC players were furious in a way that made news, and Treyarch, making the next game, made a point of announcing that theirs would have dedicated servers and a browser to find them with.

That decision is why this game is on a server directory at all, and why fifteen years later there is still something here to connect to. Listings gather on the Black Ops hub.

What you are buying

Black Ops is a paid game on Steam and it contains three fairly separate products.

The campaign is a Cold War story that moves between Vietnam, Cuba and a great many interrogation rooms. It is well regarded and it is not why you are reading this.

The competitive multiplayer is the Call of Duty of that era — fast, twitchy, built around a class you assemble yourself. And Zombies is the co-operative survival mode that Treyarch had invented two years earlier and which by this point had become a reason to buy the game on its own.

Our Steam guide is the prerequisite read if Steam is unfamiliar.

The multiplayer, and what makes it that specific vintage

Every Call of Duty from this period runs on the same skeleton. You build a loadout before the match, you earn experience, and experience unlocks more things to put in the loadout.

Black Ops put a currency on top of that. You earn points from playing and you spend them on weapons, attachments, perks and a startling amount of cosmetic customisation, which means two players at the same rank can have completely different arsenals depending on what they chose to buy. The emblem editor that came with it was absurdly capable for 2010 and the community used it for exactly what you would expect.

Killstreaks reward consecutive kills with escalating hardware, and the design consequence is that a good player snowballs. Get three, use them to get five, use those to get eight. A match where one person on the other team goes uninterrupted for two minutes is a match your team is going to lose, and answering that early is most of the tactical content.

Wager matches were the other novelty. Small playlists with deliberately silly rules — a gun game where every kill advances your weapon, a mode where you have one bullet and a knife, a mode with a crossbow and a hammer — played for a stake. They were a good idea and most of them have been quietly reinvented several times since.

Zombies

Four players, one enclosed map, and waves of the undead that get faster and more numerous until they kill you. There is no winning. There is only how far you got.

The loop is tight and it has barely been improved on. You shoot zombies for points, you spend points opening doors to expand the playable area, you spend more points on wall weapons and on the mystery box that gives you something random. Barricades need repairing between waves. The map has a hidden structure to it — a sequence of things to activate in an order the game never tells you — and working that out is the real game underneath the shooting.

The maps in this one are the ones people still talk about. Kino der Toten is where most players start, a derelict theatre with a teleporter and a layout that teaches you how to run a train of zombies in a circle. "Five" puts you in the Pentagon with a considerably meaner design. Ascension, Call of the Dead, Shangri-La and Moon each pushed further into the elaborate, with Moon in particular being the point where the mode stopped pretending it was a bonus feature.

There is also a top-down arcade mode hidden in the menus, which is not what anybody expected and is genuinely fun.

Four-player Zombies on a dedicated server with people who know the map is one of the better co-operative experiences of its generation, and it holds up.

The mode also produces a social dynamic nothing else quite matches. Everybody survives together or nobody does, there is no scoreboard to hide behind, and the person who wanders off alone at wave fourteen and gets cornered has visibly cost the other three their run. Groups develop conventions about who opens which door and who is allowed near the mystery box, and those conventions are enforced with considerable feeling.

The correct number of players is four. Two is survivable and slow. One is a different game entirely — solo Zombies is a serious discipline with its own techniques, and it is not where anybody should start.

Combat Training, and why you should use it

Black Ops shipped with a mode that put you against bots on the ordinary multiplayer maps, and it is the most underrated thing in the package.

The value is not that the bots are convincing. It is that the maps are the same maps. Learning where the sightlines are, which routes the spawn areas feed into, and where people stand on a map you have never seen is much easier when the opposition is not punishing every second of hesitation. Twenty minutes of this before your first real match saves you an hour of being confused.

It is also the answer for an evening when nothing is populated. A game whose community server scene is fifteen years old does not have people on at every hour, and a bot match on the map you were going to play anyway is better than staring at an empty browser.

Private matches with custom rules sit alongside it. Set the score limits, the time limits, which weapons are allowed, and play with a group of friends without anybody else joining. This is how a great deal of Call of Duty is actually played once a group has settled into it — the same six people, their own rules, nobody they did not invite.

Finding a server and joining it

This is where a modern habit will fail you. There is no queue that finds you a game on the community side. You pick a machine and you connect to it.

The in-game browser lists what it can find and lets you filter by mode and by whether the server is full. It has always been slow to populate and it has always sorted badly, which is the same complaint every server browser of that decade attracted.

A cleaner approach is to choose the server first and connect to it directly. Listings collect on the hub here, queried rather than self-reported, and how to find the best game servers walks through judging one before you invest an evening in it.

Two details that matter:

Take the port with the address. A host running several servers on one machine has moved most of them off the default. An address copied without its port fails silently, which is the worst way for anything to fail.

Use the favourites list. The browser lets you store servers, and a game at this stage of its life rewards that heavily. Populations concentrate on a small number of boxes and those boxes fill at a particular hour in a particular region. Three favourites in your own timezone is the difference between finding a game and concluding there is nothing on.

The console on this generation of Call of Duty is a setting in the game's own options rather than something that is on by default. Once enabled it accepts a connect command with an address, in the manner every game descended from this engine family has since the nineties. If your build does not expose it, the favourites list does the same job with more clicking.

The honest state of it

Two things you should know before you spend money.

The population is not what it was, and it is not distributed evenly. Some regions have a handful of servers that fill every evening and some have nothing at all. Check the hub before assuming, and check it at the hour you would actually be playing rather than at the hour you happen to be reading this.

The second is less comfortable. Older Call of Duty titles on PC have a documented history of security problems in their networking code, and this has periodically been a story. The practical advice is the same advice that applies to any old multiplayer game with a community server scene: play on servers that belong to a community with a name and a reputation, rather than on an anonymous box with a suspiciously full player count. What makes a server listing trustworthy is about how to tell those apart.

That is not a reason to avoid the game. It is a reason to be slightly choosier than you would be in a modern title where the publisher runs everything.

Problems you will actually hit

The browser shows nothing. Clear your filters first — a stale filter for a mode nobody is running produces an empty list that looks like a dead game. Then try connecting to a specific address instead.

You join and are immediately dropped. A full server holding a slot back, or a server enforcing a rule about accounts. Try the next one.

Everything is at 200 ms. You are connected to another continent. The browser does not sort by ping as helpfully as it should, and a server's advertised region is a weaker signal than you would like.

Progression does not seem to save. Not every server counts towards your progression — that distinction was built into the design, and a server running custom rules generally sits outside it.

The game will not start after a Windows update. A fifteen-year-old title on a current operating system occasionally needs compatibility settings adjusted. Verifying the files through Steam is the first thing to try and it works more often than it should.

Where to go next

Treyarch's own lineage runs both directions from here. World at War came before it, is where Zombies was invented, and has the deeper custom map scene by a wide margin thanks to official mod tools. Black Ops III came later and took the mode further than anybody expected.

Infinity Ward's side of the series is the other half of the picture, and Call of Duty 4 is the one that reset the entire genre. It still has committed community servers running it.

If it is the older and slower Second World War Call of Duty you are after rather than the modern one, the original and its United Offensive expansion are both still running, and they behave much more like the games that inspired them than like anything with a killstreak in it.

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JoinGG is a live directory of community game servers. Every listing is queried directly every fifteen minutes, so the player count you see was measured rather than reported by its owner, and each one carries a copyable connect address. Call of Duty: Black Ops servers are listed here, and every game on the site has its own hub. Player counts across every game are on the statistics page.