GAMES · STORY NOTES

Call of Duty: Black Ops III

Call of Duty: Black Ops III is a 2015 first-person shooter game developed by Treyarch and published by Activision. Black Ops III is set in 2065, 40 years after the events of Black Ops II, in a world shaped by the impacts of climate change and the rise of advanced technologies, including cybernetic enhancements.

Description adapted from Wikipedia contributors, Call of Duty: Black Ops III · CC BY-SA 4.0. Text adapted for this entry.

FULL SPOILERS AHEAD

The story, including the ending.

These write-ups discuss major events and outcomes for this listed work. Each source and its coverage are identified below.

Source plot synopsis — includes the ending

=== Campaign ===
Forty years after the events of Call of Duty: Black Ops II, the world is in the midst of a Third Cold War between the Winslow Accord (WA) and the Common Defense Pact (CDP). On October 27, 2065, the Player (Ben Browder/Abby Brammell) and their partner Jacob Hendricks (Sean Douglas) of WA Black Ops are deployed to Ethiopia to rescue the Egyptian Prime Minister and other hostages from the CDP-aligned Nile River Coalition (NRC). The extraction goes awry, leaving the Player critically wounded by a combat robot. Rescued by fellow operative John Taylor (Christopher Meloni), the Player undergoes emergency cybernetic surgery, including a direct neural interface (DNI), and receives virtual training from Taylor and his teammates Sebastian Diaz (Reynaldo Gallegos), Sarah Hall (Katee Sackhoff), and Peter Maretti (Ary Katz); Hendricks also volunteers for surgery.
After five years of wetwork, the Player and Hendricks are assigned to CIA handler Rachel Kane (Rachel Kimsey) to investigate a CIA black site in Singapore. They find it attacked by the crime syndicate 54 Immortals, and the site's data stolen, leading Kane to conclude Taylor's team defected and murdered the staff. To locate the data, the Player and Hendricks disguise as arms dealers to meet the Immortals, but their cover is blown, resulting in the death of the Immortals' leader Goh Min. They recover data pointing to Taylor's last known location at a Coalescence Corporation facility in Singapore, destroyed ten years earlier in a deadly explosion. At the facility, they find a hidden CIA laboratory and discover Diaz leaking classified intel to the CDP, and they are forced to kill him. Diaz's DNI reveals Taylor's goal is to find the two survivors of the explosion: CEO Sebastian Krueger (Robert Picardo) and Dr. Yousef Salim (Tony Amendola). When the leaked intel leads to Kane's capture by the Immortals, the Player defies orders to leave her behind and rescues her by killing Goh Min's sister, Xiulan (Lynn Chen).
The trio travels to Cairo and finds Salim, who reveals he conducted illegal DNI experiments involving calming humans through imagining a frozen forest. The NRC then invades, allowing Taylor's team to abduct Salim, who is tortured and executed by Taylor. The trio pursues Taylor with the Egyptian Army's help, but faces resistance from Hall. After killing Hall, the Player connects to her DNI and encounters Corvus, a gestalt intelligence manifested during the experiments to monitor DNI users' thoughts. Corvus malfunctioned, causing the explosion and later infecting Taylor's team. Corvus' obsession with finding the forest spread to the Player and Hendricks after they interfaced with Hall and Diaz respectively. After killing Maretti, the duo spark an uprising against the NRC, using the chaos to locate and corner Taylor. Taylor manages to resist Corvus and pulls out his DNI, but is killed by Hendricks, who abandons the Player to pursue Krueger.
The Player and Kane race to Coalescence's headquarters in Zürich to stop Hendricks, but discover Corvus is storing Nova 6 gas, previously used in the Singapore explosion. Kane tries to contain it but is locked in a room, and the gas is leaked, killing her in front of the Player. The Player finds Hendricks holding Krueger hostage; after Hendricks kills Krueger, the Player kills him in turn. The Player attempts to commit suicide to stop Corvus but is trapped in a simulated frozen forest created by Corvus as an afterlife for deceased DNI users. As a glitch, Taylor's consciousness reunites with the Player, advising they must purge their DNI to end Corvus. With Taylor's help, the Player resists Corvus and deletes the virus, then escapes and identifies as "Taylor" to Zürich Security Forces.
Taylor's mission reports reveal that the Player actually died during their surgery due to complications. The events that follow until Taylor's death occur in a simulation that diverges from Taylor's and Hendricks's experience of hunting down Dylan Stone and his team (Javier Ramirez, Alice Conrad, and Joseph Fierro), who defected after discovering the black site. The Player's consciousness is shown living in Taylor's mind throughout the simulation, indicating that the Player took over Taylor's body after his simulated death until the DNI purge results in Corvus and the Player being erased as Taylor regains control.

Nightmares

The Player wakes up only to be told by Dr. Salim that they are dead, and that the Player must recount their memories. The Player tells Dr. Salim that they are a Deadkiller, an Undead Exterminator whose cybernetic augments make them immune to Zombie infection. The year is 2070, ten years after Virus 61-15, a CIA weapon combining biochemicals Nova 6 and Element 115, spread across the Earth and caused the dead to rise as Zombies and create mutated creatures known as Parasites. The Player was sent to investigate the disappearance of Taylor's Deadkiller team at a facility in Singapore, which was the initial outbreak point of the virus. However, upon investigating, the Player and Hendricks discover that Taylor's team has used their DNI connections to disable the Quarantine Zone defenses all over the world. Teaming up with Rachel Kane, the Player and Hendricks chase Taylor's team all from Singapore to Egypt, eventually being forced to kill the entire team. However, Hendricks is infected by the same virus that turned Taylor and his team mad, and heads for Zurich. The Player discovers that Dr. Salim is in fact Deimos, the demigod responsible for unleashing the undead plague on humanity. Deimos had entered the Player's mind when they interfaced with Hall, and attempts to manipulate them into opening a portal to his home dimension, Malus. The Player is then contacted by another demigod, Dolos, who is sympathetic to humanity and seeks to kill Deimos, her brother. Dolos transports both the Player and Deimos to Malus, where Deimos is vulnerable. Under Dolos' guidance, the Player kills Deimos, ending the undead plague on Earth, but trapping the Player in Malus. Dolos then explains to the Player that her true plans are to kill every other demigod and supernatural being that can challenge her, and the Player agrees to help her.

=== Zombies ===
Sources and content license

Source and revision history ↗ · Adapted from Wikipedia contributors, Call of Duty: Black Ops III. Section headings and formatting adjusted. · Content license