Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 arrives on October 25, and after a four-year development time, Treyarch has finally revealed multiplayer and the new Warzone map called Area 99. GameSpot was able to get hands-on with Black Ops 6 during Activision’s Call of Duty: Next event, which featured multiplayer and the next Warzone map. Black Ops 6 feels very polished with new action star movement that is a blast to use, but I do worry that it won’t take long for high-skilled players to exploit the system and ruin the fun.
Movement for action-hero plays
Black Ops 6 definitely feels like a Black Ops game with its fast-paced action, arcade style, and vibrant maps. The biggest difference this year is Treyarch’s new movement system, which further adapts the fluidity and pace of the typical Black Ops multiplayer experience.
Omnimovement allows you to sprint, slide, and dive in any direction. Whereas previous entries limited you to just forward dives and sliding, you can now go prone and spin around 360 degrees, making for epic moves that allow you to live out your own John Wick-style action-hero fantasy.
Omnimovement’s reveal worried me as a long-time, old-school player who doesn’t bunny hop and rarely slide cancels. I already find myself being outfinessed by high-skill players who can give themselves an advantage in gunfights with these advanced techniques. The thought of my opponents using even more advanced slides and diving sounded worrisome for my future matches. I was also pretty skeptical at how the movement would feel.
However, omnimovement pleasantly surprised me. It’s a well-polished mechanic, and I found myself enjoying the moments where the movement benefited me. This includes reactions like side diving to avoid a grenade or diving backwards behind cover to reload. There were also intense moments of Domination on Skyline, where my team and I cleared the enemies away from the B flag and I dove off a balcony to land behind cover and secure the point.
These are the type of over-the-top plays I’d only expect to pull off during scripted moments of a Call of Duty campaign. Yet here I am, leveraging these moves and having a great time doing it. It’s not quite muscle memory for me yet, and I’m sometimes diving and sliding at the wrong times, but I’m learning how to better chain movements together and make my playstyle more fluid as I rack up additional game time in the beta.
Further improving the action is the new Intelligent Movement system. These are optional game settings, which are turned off by default, but I highly recommend everyone try these out. They allow you to customize a lot of basic movements, such as turning on settings for tactical sprint assist and removing the sprint delay, reducing the number of button presses needed to perform certain actions. These not only made my movement feel faster and more fluid, but it meant less input on the thumbsticks, thus it also felt much easier on my hands.
Of course, Black Ops 6’s movement is all about timing and decision-making. I’ve been at an advantage when an enemy launched at me with an ill-timed dive, and I’ve been gunned down in the same manner when the roles were reversed. So far, omnimovement hasn’t felt like it’s created a significantly higher skill gap, and casual players should still be able to hold their own against their opponents, but only time will tell if this sentiment will remain true. Right now, it’s something optional that allows you to get a bit flashy with your movements, and it doesn’t feel like a required skill you need to master. You can easily still win gunfights and find success without ever partaking in the additional movement, at least based on what we’ve seen so far.
I remain concerned that it won’t take long for high-skill players to master and possibly exploit this movement system to an even higher degree than we already see with Call of Duty’s existing slide-canceling and bunny-hopping mechanics. It’s easy for an above-average player to find exploits or slide around and break your cameras, and while it’s still too early to be certain, Black Ops 6’s more advanced movement has the ability to bring one of the highest skill gaps we’ve seen.
This year could also be tough for average/casual players who start playing post-launch. Jumping into a new Call of Duty with more complex movement long after players have mastered the movement could make for a more jarring experience than usual.
On a positive note, the beta includes the omnimovement training course that will also be in the game at launch. This allows you to practice your dives and barrel rolls with coaching narration provided by Black Ops fan-favorite operator, Frank Woods.
Brand-new maps and mostly familiar modes
While Modern Warfare 3 released with a map pool consisting of entirely remastered maps, Black Ops 6 is set to launch with a fresh offering of 16 brand-new maps. The first week of the beta includes the same map pool as our hands-on experience at Call of Duty: Next, and it’s a pretty good variety of settings with each beta map having a unique aesthetic.
Rewind is a map that takes place in and around a ’90s-themed shopping center with a Blockbuster-style video store. Derelict is a colorful yet rundown train yard, Babylon takes place in ancient city ruins of Iraq, Skyline is a luxury penthouse, and Scud is a desert military outpost.
Treyarch kept a focus on core 6v6 maps for multiplayer, so don’t expect any large-scale Ground War-style maps for this year’s launch. The maps are all small-to-medium-sized with a mostly standard three-lane design that Treyarch is known for designing. Not everyone is going to like that structure, but I appreciate that they’re not cluttered or campy maps, and it’s never going to take you long to get into the action.
The beta includes a mix of staple Call of Duty modes, with Team Deathmatch, Domination, and Hardpoint all in rotation. However, Treyarch also gives us a taste of the new Kill Order game mode. Kill Order isn’t massively innovative, but it does add a little spice for those who prefer a more casual Team Deathmatch-style mode. The mode marks one person on each team as an HVT (High-Value Target) player. Regular eliminations still count towards your team’s score, but you get even more points by keeping your HVT alive and eliminating the enemy HVT. This mode doesn’t get as sweaty as a match of Hardpoint, but it can be a whole lot of chaotic fun.
Gunplay feels satisfying
The beta gives a solid offering of weapons to try out. The XM4 is a versatile assault rifle, and the Jackal PDW is a powerful choice for an aggressive submachine gun. The weapons feel mostly balanced for their class, with the one exception being the Jackal PDW–the submachine gun is a bit overpowered in this first week of the beta. Weapon tuning will likely take place during the beta and prior to launch though, so hopefully it’s in a better place by the time the game releases.
The time-to-kill in Black Ops 6 feels consistent and a little faster than Cold War’s slower 150-health, but even with the game’s return to classic 100-health, it doesn’t feel too fast. It’s perhaps closer in line with the TTK currently found in MW3.
The audio and visual designs are highly polished as well. The guns all look and sound amazing to use. Some of the more recent Call of Duty games started with too much visual recoil, which was a combination of smoke and gun wobble that could distract and reduce visibility in gunfights, but thankfully Black Ops 6 doesn’t seem to have any major visual recoil hindering your fights. The footstep audio might be a little low, but everything else in action sounds well-tuned.
It’s also worth noting that visibility is great this year. A problem with recent Call of Duty games, especially early in the betas, was poor visibility with washed-out color palettes and hard-to-see enemies and nametags. However, Black Ops 6 has great lighting and visuals. I never find myself shooting at teammates or squinting to try and tell who’s an enemy.
A mostly standard loadout system
The create-a-class system is what you’d expect from a Treyarch-developed Call of Duty, but one major difference works towards its goal of providing the best movement. All loadouts now have a dedicated melee slot, so you don’t need to sacrifice a secondary weapon for a knife. You also get unlimited tac-sprint with the knife in hand, allowing you to swap to a blade and speed around the map.
Modern Warfare 3 labeled traditional perks as wearable gear pieces, such as a vest that worked just like the classic Overkill perk to carry an additional primary weapon. Over time, new gear pieces were added in seasonal updates that offered similar perks already featured in the game, and gear pieces became a more confusing way of getting the classic Call of Duty perks you needed for your playstyle. It’s nice to see Black Ops 6 go back and streamline perks into the typical three categories. The perks are much of the classic offerings, such as Ghost, Double Time, and, Flak Jacket, but Treyarch does bring back the Wildcard feature from previous Black Ops games, which provides an additional way to customize your loadouts. In the beta, we only have two options: Overkill to carry a second primary weapon and Perk Greed to equip one additional perk. Both feel like good Wildcard options to have. I lean more towards Overkill for my loadouts, but it will likely depend on your playstyle which you choose.
Beta killstreaks
The Gunsmith is a lot more straightforward than what we’ve seen in recent years. There’s no worry of advanced weapon tuning, conversion kits, or even an overwhelming amount of attachments like we saw in Call of Duty: Vanguard. It’s just a simple Gunsmith customization that allows for up to five attachments. Attachments also feel much more straightforward, with a variety of pros and very few cons.
Instead of getting to choose between earning killstreaks or scorestreaks, Black Ops 6 just offers scorestreaks, which is great to help promote objective play. The beta includes familiar options, with streaks like the UAV, Counter UAV, chopper gunner, and even Treyarch’s iconic RC-XD remote-controlled car.
Warzone focuses on small map Resurgence
For Warzone, Treyarch was focused on creating a Resurgence map with a story that only its studio could tell. Area 99 is a small Warzone map inspired by Treyarch’s most iconic multiplayer map, Nuketown, with a focus on the points-of-interest telling the origin story of how the Nuketown map was created. This includes a manufacturing facility for the Nuketown model houses, a nuclear reactor, a mannequin-assembly center, and an underground bunker.
At first glance, I thought the map looked too small and drab. I expected more pops of color like we see in Treyarch’s multiplayer map design, but Area 99 is a lot of washed-out colors and boring concrete. However, the Nuketown story here is interesting and unique, and the map plays really well for its purpose as a Resurgence map, which is all about facilitating a more frantic and fast-past battle royale experience.
Area 99 is smaller than Rebirth Island, and it makes for plenty of quick engagements. We only played a handful of matches at Call of Duty: Next, given our short amount of playtime, but each one was met with instant action.
Area 99 map layout
That said, don’t expect too many new bells and whistles for this new year of Warzone. Movement is the focus for the developers, and the new features arriving with integration–such as Black Ops 6’s omnimovement and the advantage of unlimited tac-sprint with the dedicated melee slot–are among the game’s biggest updates. Improved movement and quality-of-life changes can always make the Warzone experience better, but I’m really hoping the developer has more plans up its sleeve for dynamic map changes and special events to help keep battle royale from getting too stale.
One welcome change, however, is the removal of Warzone’s backpack system. There are still dedicated slots for holding important equipment, such as the gas mask, field upgrade, one killstreak, and tactical and lethal equipment, but ditching the backpack means no one can hoard a bunch of game-changing killstreaks and equipment for the final circle. Additionally, armor and ammo satchels are introduced to make sure you can still store enough plates and ammo for your fights now that the backpacks are gone.
Final thoughts
Overall, Treyarch’s move to the new engine feels like a success, and the extra development time can definitely be felt in the polish of the multiplayer beta. The only issues of note so far are some minor freezing and hiccups with the servers, and that the Jackal PDW needs to be nerfed. While I haven’t had enough playtime with Area 99 to give in-depth impressions yet, it already feels like Warzone is getting a potentially solid new map design for the Resurgence modes.
My biggest concern for Black Ops 6 post-launch is the skill gap that could eventually be created by the movement and offering powerful gun attachments that don’t feature any cons, but only time will tell how sweaty this omnimovement will become. For now, it looks as if Treyarch has redefined Call of Duty’s fast-paced action with omnidirectional movement, making multiplayer a blast.
