Image: “Call of Duty: Black Ops 6” (2024) Key Art
Every year since 2005, the gaming industry has been headlined by the autumn release of one franchise, a game series which routinely graces the top of sales charts and player counts. “Call of Duty,” in its heyday, could be better described as a phenomenon than as a video game. Gaming culture of the 2000s and 2010s became defined by the frenetic first-person shooter, which attracted a massive audience and served as the introduction to the hobby for innumerable young players. The associated iconography of Mountain Dew, Doritos and Xbox Live ushered in the era of mass-market online gaming which persists today. In recent years, though, the king of the multiplayer shooter is not so clear — you’ll get a wide range of answers depending on who you ask. Rather than being the unchallenged champion of the genre, “Call of Duty” in 2024 finds itself amid a crowded field of massively popular counterparts, each of which have made innovations of their own and attracted dedicated fanbases. It is in this contentious environment that “Black Ops 6,” the franchise’s newest game, held two multiplayer betas over the course of the last month. Having played this early taste of the game’s core mode, it is clear that the “Call of Duty” which exists today is a distant stranger to the game which dominated the seventh console generation. Time has not done the once-heralded franchise any favors.
One of the game’s marquee new features, “omnimovement,” introduces a new level of speed and mobility into the core gameplay. With this brand new movement system, players can sprint in any direction and do so without any speed penalties. In games past, sprinting could only be done straight ahead and vertical; side-to-side movement was relatively cumbersome and slow. This was not a design oversight, though: movement speed in prior Call of Duty games has consistently been very meticulously calculated. During the early “Modern Warfare” and “Black Ops” era of the franchise, the boots-on-ground combat placed heavy emphasis on positioning and map knowledge — perhaps being even as important as reflexes and precision. A slow movement speed demanded not only intention of players, but premeditation as well. Most often, attempting to strafe once engaged in a gunfight resulted in losing the battle. Poor positioning was punished through sluggish lateral movement.
In “Black Ops 6,” this philosophy is entirely discarded. The ability to enter and maintain a sprint in any direction of a full 360-degree radius means that positioning and lane control are substantially less impactful on a player’s performance. If you can burst around a corner in a sideways sprint and spray down your opponent in the midst of a dolphin dive, the need to have any amount of forethought in your movement around the map or enemy locations is almost completely eliminated. The result of this philosophical shift in design is a multiplayer shooter in which razor-sharp reflexes and pinpoint precision reign supreme over any other skill that was once central to the franchise’s formula. As such, getting an elimination in “Black Ops 6” is more akin to hitting a 98-mph fastball than actually playing an arcade shooter; lightning quick reactions almost solely determine your success. With this fundamental change in the gameplay loop, the casual experience is sacrificed at the altar of “innovation.”
Also gravely detrimental to the game’s fun-factor is Activision’s heavy-handed implementation of skill-based matchmaking (SBMM). This system functionally turns the casual playlist into a de facto competitive playlist, by assembling every match based on a player’s skill level: if you have a kill-death ratio of 1.20, the servers will do their absolute best to assemble a match of players who also have a ratio in that range. This method of compiling matches results in an experience that is, very simply, not fun. Playing with and against players who are exactly the same skill level as you creates gridlocked and highly competitive matches that require you to commit 110% of your concentration if you want any hope of performing well. For a franchise that once built its reputation upon quick and casual shooter fun, this systemic change is entirely oppositional to the series’ identity. Good performances are punished in SBMM, discouraging players from booting up the game in the first place. The system seemingly tries its best to keep you at a flat 1.00 kill-death ratio. If you manage to finish a game with, say, 50 eliminations and 20 deaths, the high of such a great game will surely be short-lived. Your next match, invariably, will include an enemy team composed exclusively of FaZe members and TikTok pros who will drop-shot and quick-scope you at every corner. Why should the undeniable fun of having a monster game always be a pyrrhic victory? If Joel Embiid puts up 70 points against the Wizards one night, the league office isn’t going to pit him against prime Shaquille O’Neal for his next game in an attempt to keep things fair. Skill diversity is absolutely imperative to any casual online gaming experience for it to be enjoyable. Modern “Call of Duty” has no regard for this principle.
Not only does money make the world go round, but more importantly, it keeps shareholders happy. Thus, “Call of Duty” in its recent interactions has shamelessly made every attempt to coerce its players into whipping out their credit cards. Let’s be very clear about something: “Call of Duty,” in its current monetization model, should be a free-to-play game. In addition to selling you a $70 base game, multiple $10 season passes are shoved down the consumer’s throat each year, with the further addition of the item shop, which contains a plethora of $20 cosmetic packs. If Activision is so intent on selling users premium passes and skins once they are already on the game, the $70 upfront fee for the privilege of being shaken down becomes inexcusable. “Fortnite,” the game which has largely stolen the mantle of multiplayer shooter popularity from “Call of Duty” in the 2020s, has done so for good reason: the game is free and continuous. For those who decide to purchase a skin in “Fortnite,” they do so not having paid an upfront fee and with the knowledge that they’ll be able to use that skin in perpetuity. In “Call of Duty,” on the other hand, purchasing a $20 cosmetic means that you have spent $90 on the game. Let’s further assume that you purchase four season passes, behind which are locked a number of limited-time exclusive items. This would come close to constituting the “full experience,” at least as Activision presents it. In the end, engaging with the game in this way would cost you a jaw-dropping $130, all for a product which has a lifetime of no more than 12 months. The extent to which this is truly slimy, disgusting corporate behavior is gut-wrenching for fans who have watched this transition take place in horrifying slow-motion.
“Call of Duty” is in the midst of an identity crisis, and it has been for some time. “Black Ops 6” is not only more of the same, but it may very well be the worst experience I have had with the once-illustrious franchise. As a fan who grew up on the classics of “Black Ops 1,” “2” and “3,” making such cutting critiques of a series I once loved brings me no joy. The fact remains though, and we’re fools to not admit it: “Call of Duty,” as we had once known it, is dead. The zombified, creatively-bankrupt, corporate husks which are released today serve only as a reminder of a bygone era. “Call of Duty” is no longer the king, and the throne sits empty.
Carlo Constantine is a third-year Political Science major with minors in Journalism and Spanish. CC1031591@wcupa.edu