Microsoft wasn’t messing around with its Xbox showcase this year. After multiple announcements of job losses and studio closures, the company tried to give gamers what they wanted in its Sunday night Summer Game Fest slot, which ended with a full 40-minute preview of Call of Duty: Black Ops 6, a game so large it will require a 300GB download, with constant online access even for the single-player mode due to the amount of textures it streams from remote servers. As expected, the Xbox version will be available on GamePass day one, but there will be no platform exclusivity – the PlayStation version will arrive the same day: October 25.
The game’s story is set during the geopolitical turmoil of the early 1990s, including the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Gulf War, and the transition of the US presidency from George Bush to Bill Clinton. As usual, the campaign story is an airport spy thriller, featuring unmissable CIA ops, covert power struggles, and conspiracies that go all the way to the very top. Series regular Frank Woods has been seriously injured and removed from active duty, giving way to reckless spec ops squad leader Troy Marshall and smart CIA handler Jane Harrow. When a mission goes awry, they’re forced to go rogue by recruiting a ragtag team of tech whizzes and charming assassins. It’s almost certainly going to happen Yours Sir, there is a line for the donkey here.
In keeping with most recent Call of Duty titles, Black Ops 6 promises a bit of variety in how you approach campaign missions. Most set-pieces, whether you’re in a swanky casino in southern Europe or the northern Russian tundra, allow for attacking with all guns blazing or advancing stealthily. There are also scenes where players can interact with NPCs to open up new possibilities, such as bribing senators to allow entry to forbidden areas. We’re going to see familiar faces from the era, including Saddam Hussein, George Bush and Margaret Thatcher, although perhaps thankfully Activision has confirmed that at least the latter won’t be a playable option.
Call of Duty titles are typically built over a two-year period, but this time co-developers Treyarch and Raven had twice that time. “We were given the opportunity to really redefine what a Black Ops game is,” says associate design director Matt Scronce. “We could be very thoughtful about every single decision we made. In the past, each game built on the previous game, but with this game, it was really like a ground floor build — a new definition of Black Ops.”
A big change in gameplay is a new system called Omnidirection that lets players run and slide in every direction. “The fluidity of movement was a big thing we talked about a lot,” says Yael Miller, senior director of production at Treyarch. “It sparked a desire to see what we could do.”
Scrones elaborated, “Initially we tried a juke, a quick sidestep. But when we looked at movement for Black Ops 6, it was about putting players in this state of flow, and having fluidity and fidelity, and something like a juke wasn’t working for us in that regard. So we went back to the drawing board. For over 20 years, you could only run forwards in Call of Duty, so we looked at the best of the best in the real world: NFL players, NBA players, tennis players, they can all move very quickly in every direction.”
Players now have 360 degrees of movement in which they can run, dive, and glide, which should allow them to adopt a variety of evasive tactics – you can lie on your back and roll for cover, or even recreate that classic movement from Hong Kong action films of the era: sliding on your back while shooting forward. Naturally, the system required thousands of new frames of animation and mo-cap, which could only be done with all that extra development time.
According to the team, accessibility has also been a key element. A new intelligent movement system has been introduced, which includes crouch, sprint and mental assists that can be toggled on and off. Players can choose to fully automate leaping over walls or sliding under low obstructions. The inspiration for this came from a range of different games. “I looked at the Forza series, which has traction control, anti-lock and turn assist,” says Scronce. “Also mobile games are a great example of this, like, you don’t have any physical buttons, so what are they doing there?” The HUD has also been made customisable so players can move onscreen information like the mini-map around. This is a feature designed with Call of Duty streamers in mind, as they often want to add their own in-game camera view, and struggle to decide where to place it without obscuring important information.
The crucial multiplayer component has been significantly overhauled, with some of the recent changes being rolled back. There are 16 new maps, most of which adopt the traditional three-lane design, while the Prestige system, which allows skilled veteran players to show off their mastery with special outfits, accessories and classed weapons, has returned in the style of previous Black Ops games. Treyarch is also promising a huge arsenal of guns from the era with dozens of attachments.
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On the other hand, the regular Call of Duty Zombies mode, first introduced by Treyarch in 2008’s World at War, is going back to its roots. The latest Modern Warfare titles introduced a new type of open-world zombie game, but Black Ops 6 is going back to the old round-based framework in which players work together to survive waves of incoming undead attacks while unlocking new weapons and exploring confined environments.
So the Call of Duty monster truck marches on, bringing with it a cavalcade of concerns about the appropriation of recent historical events, the glamorization of US foreign policy and enthusiasm for military-grade weapons. But like the best blockbuster war movies, it has its own charm, and Black Ops 6 looks to bring some interesting additions to the series experience – which perhaps shows the benefit of giving the studio a little more time. As Scronce says: “I think across the board, the extra time has allowed us to pay attention to the details and push that extra bit where we can all say, whether it’s character fidelity or movement, or animations, or audio or our multiplayer maps, this is the best work we’ve ever done.”
