The highly anticipated next instalment in the Call of Duty franchise, Black Ops 6, is almost here, and ahead of its launch this Friday 25th October, we thought we’d add to the hype with some of the exciting new things to try and check out in the game, straight from Treyarch’s very own mouths.
For all the new mechanics, maps and modes coming to Black Ops 6 in general, you can check out our articles here on Omni Movement, Zombies & Warzone.
Zombies
Round-based zombies is back! And who better to get the hot tips of new things to try in this fan favourite mode than from one of the main guys behind BOPS6 Zombies himself, Kevin Drew, Associate Director of Design at Treyarch.
We had a chance to speak to Kevin at the COD Next event in Washington DC earlier in the year, and quizzed him on some of the must tries for players jumping into Black Ops 6 come launch, whether they’re veterans or newcomers to the game.
First off the rank was the new Directed Mode coming to Zombies, which will be the perfect avenue for first-time Call of Duty or Zombies players, as well as those who want a more relaxed approached to the normal chaos and mayhem the mode provides. Kevin spoke to how Directed Mode will give players a whole new way and feel to play Zombies, stating:
“It’s two big things. It’s one, actually guiding you through the entire main quest, which is usually like something that’s very cryptic and hard to discover; most people end up going online to watch tutorial videos on how to do this thing. The other thing is this time pressure of the rounds are just escalating, right? So you just kind of feel that pressure. And so this mode guides you all the way through, and it also gates the rounds as you progress. So until I get to the pack of punch, it will loop at round three.
And so, you can kind of just chill and kill zombies at your own pace and that was an element from Outbreak we wanted to bring over. And then, you know, you complete the first main step, now it goes up to round five, round eight and then at any point you can kind of like, if you feel underpowered or you died and got revived and I need to earn some points, you can just keep killing zombies and, you know, go to jug…get yourself set up again and continue.
So we’re really excited about it, we think it’s a nice alternative. What’s also really cool is now that we have this, we can make the standard mode a little bit closer to Black Ops 3. For example, we’re going to like turn off prompts and key lines at launch, so the Easter egg hunt, or the main quest hunt is going to be, hopefully, a little bit longer and long term fans will be more happy.”
Alongside Directed Mode comes other new ways to play such as the addition of 3rd-person in Zombies. With players having the ability to toggle this option on or off, Kevin said, “It’s nice to have that awareness of zombies coming around from all sides, for a game mode that generally is a little tight. And of course, just seeing yourself doing the new omni movement is also really cool, it’s a nice way to showcase it.”
Other surprise and delights for players will come in the way of the living world itself. Kevin mentioned that players will be immediately pleased by the storytelling in the world, by simple aspects never really experienced in Zombies before, such as a zombie coming out of the trunk of a car, or bursting out of a second floor motel room. But of course it’ll be the classic Easter eggs that’ll be the most fun for players, Kevin believes, saying “I think when you dive deeper like the Easter eggs, it’s gonna be what really surprises and delights, like we got some fun Easter eggs in there and we’re waiting for people to discover.”
We couldn’t walk away from our chats with Kevin without asking him his go to perk and loadout choices, and maybe the more fun weapons for players to check out:
“My go to perk is Deadshot Daiquiri first, because that is aimed down sights to the head. And so I just like favour that over everything else and then surprisingly I like pistols, just ’cause they’re so fast. So I can just kind of…I’m such a console gamer, like I’m just like, you know, ADS and I just snap, snap, head, head, head. Very satisfying. I’m a big, Cryo Freeze fan for the ammo mod too. Just the ability to like slow down zombies and do more damage is like, I like the crowd control. And then my field upgrade, Dark Flare, ‘cause I love that more powerful, but smaller use for the like penetrative beam, just like sweeping, obliterate the area.”
“In terms of weapons and wonder weapons, the Jet Gun is a beast! I think I like Beam Smasher though, cause I like to keep my mobility high. I like to be able to run around. The Beam Smasher is a very satisfying weapon, that’s the Terminus Wonder Weapon. And it’s just like this penetrated beam that just like dissolves zombies as you target guys. And it’s also when you reload it actually does a blast and it has an alt fire that stuns like a radius of zombies and actually weakens them to the beam. So it’s got this nice combo element, so that’s my answer. They’re all fun. It’s so fun making Wonder Weapons.”
Multiplayer & Warzone
We were also able to spend time with Yale Miller, Senior Director of Production, and Matt Scronce, Associate Design Director, from Treyarch to chat more on the Multiplayer, and some what Warzone, experience, and the must tries for players jumping in on launch day.
Of course the big one is omni movement, and if launch day will be your very first time jumping into the BOPS6 world and trying out the new movement mechanic, then Yale and Matt had some key pointers for you to try out. The major one being trying out the map Skyline with the new omni movement, with Matt stating,
“Skyline, that’s a great example of where level design and gameplay comes together. And we’ve got that balcony above the pool. And it’s like, well, what if I could dive from this balcony into the pool? And then what if I do a backwards dive into the pool whilst shooting back at an enemy?” Yale followed up with, “I think the biggest impact is going to be how people approach staircases and different situations, doors, all those kinds of things. I think it’s going to be more about how players use the movement versus the maps changing. I think more players will eventually and more of our level designers will play more and they’ll start to design little things. There’s definitely nuances. I think Skyline is a great example.”
Another feature that some players may forget is even an option to customise now is the HUD, with the addition of HUD presets. There was a lot of debate amongst the Treyarch team about what HUDs to use and which works best for BOPS, with the guys mentioning,
“We literally like, looked at all the HUDs we’ve ever done, all the HUDs that have ever been in the franchise, HUDs in other places, and there was literally debates about like, oh, what about this one or this one? We also do a thing at the studio called Team Dev Match, where people talk and they like basically do little projects, little game jams. And so it’s in some of that debate, it was debating like which HUD is better.”
In the end, the final decision came from the simple notion of letting players choose for themselves, and thus, HUD presets were born:
“Part of it was like, let people play the way they want to play, and like, I don’t think there is a best HUD, I don’t think that exists, because players have different opinions, so, and it’s so important to what people do, so, giving people the option, I think there’s gonna be a bunch of options in the beta, I don’t think we will ship with all those options, and I think some of the options that will be in the beta will change based on what we see, and then I think once the game comes out, we’ll start to see, and like, we’ll hear from the community like, I really want this version or why doesn’t it do this with those. I think it’s something that can evolve. So I think making the HUD just like everything else simple, easy to read, but then giving players the choice to customise, I think is important.”
Of course, during our time with Matt and Yale we did try to throw in some cheeky questions on post launch content to see what answers we could get from them (not too much as predicted), but they still had some things to say,
“We’ve got a bunch of cool post launch things planned, obviously things we can’t yet talk about, but yes a lot of cool stuff for Season 1, 2…obviously there’s big news in the spring for all of us and things that are coming out. But yeah, there’s gonna be maps, modes, gear, gadgets all those things, all the way through.”
With our final questions to the guys obviously being the most important question of all…
Jake: Is Prop Hunt coming to Black Ops 6?
Matt: I hope so…
Jake: Is that a little wink that won’t be picked up by audio?
Yale: *laughs* Ah!
Matt: Again…we went through every Black Ops game and said, what are the best Black Ops game modes?…
Yale: …We have data too. So like, we like, look at what are the modes that people play a lot? What are the modes that maybe not as many players play, but that have really devoted fans…and some of those modes, like a prop hunt, may be high on the list of things that we want to bring very soon.
Jake: Noice!
Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 launches today on PC, PlayStation and Xbox (including on Xbox Game Pass Day One for Ultimate subscribers).
