Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 is coming in at a crucial time for the franchise. While 2019’s Modern Warfare remake hit record numbers, Cold War, Vanguard, and MWII and III didn’t really do much to advance anything by a significant margin and in some cases, back tracked on a lot of what fans have liked from previous games. It’s never easy trying to maintain a consistent level of quality for an annual franchise. But Black Ops 6 has the advantage of being the first Call of Duty game in a while that has been in development for 4 whole years. There’s a lot to get excited for here. Treyarch is back at the helm, the Black Ops franchise is widely considered to be of high quality with each entry, and the brand new omni movement system is looking to shake things up in a way that Call of Duty hasn’t seen since 2014’s Advanced Warfare with its jetpacks. As of the writing of this, I’ve been playing the Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 beta for 2 days already and despite a number of issues in terms of performance and game balancing, I’ve been having a lot of fun.
The elephant in the room is how does omni movement feel now that the public has their hands on it? If anyone has played Max Payne 3, just imagine that but make it first person. You can now run, slide, and shoot from any direction in one seamless motion. I initially thought this was going to produce a whole lot of cheesy kills. Since the release of Modern Warfare 2019 and Warzone, movement, and ways to abuse and break it, has been a main cornerstone for every Call of Duty game. Like it or not, Black Ops 6 takes the twitchy, finesse, and ankle breaking capabilities of modern CoD games and cranks it up insane levels of insanity.
On one hand, it makes the gameplay feel incredibly buttery and smooth. Sliding across a corner to turn and gun down someone is just as satisfying as dolphin diving towards or away an enemy shooting at you and you somehow out-aim them because they’re too busy trying to catch up to your movement. I definitely love omni movement as it stands right now but I’m definitely weary about it as well once the full game releases and alter down the line, more and more people master it completely. I can guarantee quite a number of boomers out there will start complaining how they’re too old for this sh*t.
This is also the very first Treyarch CoD that will contain tactical sprint, which feels completely unnecessary given how omni movement already makes everything so much faster. Tactical sprint just feels like it’s just there because every CoD game now is using a unified engine, for the benefit of Warzone integration no doubt. Since it was introduced in 2019, all it did was break the momentum of the game in a way that felt too fast for its own good, messing up spawns and timings. I would love to see them consider taking it away but there’s not a chance that’s happening at this point.
Gameplay wise, it’s all that you expect out of a CoD game. Guns feel phenomenal to shoot, it’s visually great, even on lower settings, and the map flows fairly smoothly. Treyarch has always been at the top when it comes to fine tuning these things and it’s no different here in Black Ops 6. I felt more comfortable with the maps much faster than I ever did with the clunky and disjointed feel of Infinity Ward map designs.
I did notice that the map size are on the smaller side of things which I don’t necessarily hate given how annoyingly huge and bloated Vanguard, MWII, and III maps were but I also can’t deny how it can sometimes feel too chaotic with everyone just running, sliding, and dolphin diving across the map in a matter of seconds. Scud is definitely the weakest out of the current lineup, mostly because it’s just a big open area with one easily abusable high point for nasty head glitching. But everything else has been great to play with. Layouts are easily understandable, line of sights seem balanced from either side, and spawns are more readable, but could definitely use more tweaking given how fast paced everything is.
However, one of the main problems here is weapon balancing, mostly because of one gun in particular, the Jackal PDW. This submachine gun as a do-it-all tool. Close, medium, and even in longer distances, it outguns every other weapon in the game by far. Huge damage outputs, fast rate of fire, and highly forgiving recoil pattern. There is no other reason why you wouldn’t want to use this gun in its current broken state. Other than that, every other weapon is fairly balanced with each having their pros and cons. With every Treyarch CoD beta, there’s always that one gun that breaks the sandbox altogether and Black Ops 6 continues that tradition. It’ll surely be nerfed once the full game releases but for now, the Jackal is terrorizing every lobby.
Now let’s talk performance. I played the Black Ops 6 beta on an AMD Ryzen 5 5600X with a 4070 GPU setup. I initially ran it on FidelityFX settings and it’s a really good looking game, especially cranked up to high settings, but even on lower configurations. However, there was a lot of noticeable chugs where I could only reach about 140-160 fps. When I switched to DLSS and turned on frame generation, I did get a stable 240-250 fps (mostly cuz I capped it there) but it did come at the cost of weaker looking visuals despite being on Quality mode.
I also got about 5 hard crashes already. It doesn’t help that launching the game is a bit messy. You first have to launch the Call of Duty HQ app, which will require a restart if there’s an update. Then you click on Black Ops 6 which closes the HQ app and opens Black Ops 6, which also requires another restart if there’s an update. Then you can finally play the game. Too many steps? Definitely.
But despite all the gripes I mentioned, at the end of the day, it’s still Call of Duty. I have loved playing this franchise ever since the Xbox 360 days and it’ll always feel like that one franchise you can always come back to and enjoy a match or two. It’s a tried-and-true formula that has been refined, perfected, redesigned, and flipped on its head multiple times for more than a decade already. Black Ops 6 dares to challenge the norm with the new omni movement system, effectively increasing the skill gap required to master the game. It feels new and exciting, which is something I haven’t really said about the franchise for a while now. A lot of good things cooked up in the Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 beta and I can only look forward to how else they can improve upon the game with future updates.