Did you play the Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 beta?
Summer is in the rear view, which means it’s once again Call of Duty beta time. This year Treyarch is in the driver’s seat with a follow-up to Black Ops Cold War set in the early 1990s – and friends, I am all-in on the setting. After spending the weekend grinding multiplayer matches to hit the beta’s level cap, I’m cautiously optimistic that this year’s entry could recapture everything I loved about 2020’s Cold War.
Omnimove feels amazing
Probably the biggest change from the old formula is the “Omnimove” system. It seems like Treyarch looked at all the dolphin diving in Call of Duty and said “let’s just lean into that.” You can now sprint, slide, and dive in all directions, including backwards. Diving backwards puts you in a supine position, where you’re laying on your back, with 360-degrees of movement. This is a feature I never knew I wanted. Diving prone in previous Call of Duty games restricts your aiming and movement pretty severely, but the supine position gives you a new tactical strategy to employ. In fact, if you lay prone and move backwards, you’ll switch to the supine position, so you don’t even really need to do the dramatic sprint-to-backwards-dive motion.
Gunsmithing feels frustrating
One thing I do really hope they improve before the final release is the gunsmithing interface, because I don’t like it at all as it stands. Gunsmithing and chasing down weapon skins has always been one of the hooks that keeps me playing Call of Duty, but in the beta it’s kind of a pain. It resembles the interface when you edit your loadouts in a match in previous games, so you don’t get to see which attachments are still locked until you open up the category in the interface. There’s no “lock” icon on the option to show you the entire category is still unavailable, only locks on the icons for the attachments IN those categories. I found that pretty frustrating when I was leveling up my weapons. It means I’d have to open up the gunsmithing interface and then open up every attachment category, occasionally having to scroll down the options, to find out “oh, I haven’t unlocked the option to swap out my grip yet.” I ended up backing out of lobbies several times rather than making quick adjustments between matches, because I wasted a lot of that precious time manually checking what categories were open.
Gunplay feels good, but not weighty
As far as the gunplay, well… it’s Call of Duty, so it feels really good – though I don’t want to say “great” quite yet, because the guns don’t feel as weighty as in MW3 either. My general feel for almost all the guns is they take one or two shots too many to finish off an opponent. The notable exceptions to this are the two sniper rifles, which feel way overpowered as a result. Credit where credit is due, sniper rifles feel perfectly balanced in MW3, probably more so than in any other CoD I can remember. But in Black Ops 6 they currently feel too easy to use. The normal trade-off is still there, in that they’re slow to aim down sights with, but just aiming in the general vicinity of an opponent, particularly with the LR 7.62, often results in a one-shot kill. Of course, sniper rifles in multiplayer are baby guns for babies, except when I’m using them, in which case they’re good, actually.
Maps don’t feel great
The Black Ops 6 beta has six maps split across two different play modes: Core Moshpit and Faceoff. Core has four larger maps with different game modes, while Faceoff takes those same modes and squishes them down into smaller maps. I didn’t love any of the maps, to be honest, especially the smaller ones. My favorites are probably SCUD, a sprawling former SCUD missile site set in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, and Rewind, another larger map set in a suburban strip mall complete with video rental store. I didn’t like either of the small maps available in the Faceoff modes. Gala, which is set in what appears to be a Washington D.C. ballroom, is just a little too big for a “small” map, and its multi-level layout makes it feel both crowded and yet somehow still not quite small enough. Modern Warfare 3’s Stash House and Meat, along with the classic Shipment, are good examples of tight layouts that are among my favorites of all time when it comes to Call of Duty’s small map matches. They encourage strategic movement and require you to keep your head on a swivel, whereas Pit in particular has a central hub connecting with tunnels that just doesn’t feel as fluid or fun to move around in. Meanwhile, Gala’s relatively wide-open spaces meant running up the middle to claim an objective in Hardpoint was a death sentence, and a few well-placed snipers on each end of the map dictate the tempo of the entire match.
Field Upgrades feel good
I would rather have maps with lots of corners to peek around than ones with lots of obstacles to hide behind, which is how the beta maps feel for the most part. SCUD might be one of my favorite maps, but even that has several camping spots for snipers to hole up in and there’s no clear path to flank them without a little bit of luck or a well-placed spawn. However, SCUD otherwise does have a great overall layout that invites the use of pretty much any class of gun. There are tight interiors for shotguns and SMGs, medium-length corridors for LMGs and assault rifles, and of course the map-spanning hidey-holes for snipers to infuriate you with their repeated headshots. Rewind similarly enjoys a layout well-suited to a variety of weapon types, and if you’re good with any single class of weapon you’ll find your rhythm. One of the new Field Upgrades I absolutely love using is Sleeper Agent, which makes you “switch” teams for its duration. To the enemy, you look like one of their own, and you extend the length of this charade every time you get a kill. During a match on Rewind, I activated this upgrade and repeatedly caught my opponents completely unaware, letting them run past before quickly turning on them with an easy shot to the back. I got a triple kill using Sleeper Agent in the beta, all while cackling maniacally.
Overall, the beta feels promising
I still have a lot more to play once Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 comes out next month, but as far as betas go, it already seems to be in a great place. A few adjustments to weapon balance, some more UI tweaks, and the larger selection of maps at launch would fix most of the complaints I have with it right now. The gunplay is, as always, rock-solid, I never ran into a single bug, and graphically it’s really sharp. I’m feeling really good about this year’s installment… I just hope my operator skins from MW3 transfer over. That llama suit wasn’t free, you know.
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Let me know what you think about the Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 beta in the comments below!
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