How does the Prestige system work in Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War?

Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War developer Treyarch announced in a blog post that the Prestige system was making a return. While veterans of Call of Duty titles are familiar with the classic rank up format, it is going to be changed to adopt the themes of the game evolving with seasons.

Changes coming to the Prestige system

• Earn progress toward more Prestige Levels than ever before without losing any of the content you’ve already acquired.
• The best of both worlds: there’s always a new goal to pursue and your progress toward Prestige keeps growing across Seasons.
• Each new Season offers more Prestige milestones, new seasonal challenges to unlock, and more rewards to earn.

Treyarch is encouraging all players to Prestige. One factor that stopped many players from doing so, was losing all of their Create-A-Class items. Now players can activate the Prestige without any of the drawbacks.

Seasonal Prestige Leveling

At launch players can work toward the Pre-Season Prestige levels. Once a player reaches rank 55 they can activate the seasonal prestige. This rank restarts at 1. At level 50 the Season Prestige 2 is activated, at level 100 the Season Prestige 3 is reached. Once Season 1 starts, the ranks will be reset and four additional Prestige levels will be added. Each season will bring four more Prestiges for players to grind out and earn more rewards. 

The Prestige Shop

Every time a player activates a Prestige, they will gain a Prestige Key. These can be used in the Prestige shop which lets players unlock a ‘Legacy Prestige’ which is a Prestige icon from the previous games. They can showcase these when they unlock Prestige Master, after reaching the top level of Prestige in the season.