Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 seems to have had a successful launch so far. There still aren’t enough reviews out there to form a MetaCritic metascore, but early reviews and previews have been positive.
But there’s an interesting issue in the middle of the campaign. As Lucius Ignatius revealed in the latest episode of K Asante’s The Gaming Circle Podcast, Treyarch made a strange decision that’s taking him out of enjoying the single player story part of the game.
Apparently, in the middle of the story campaign, you will have to abruptly play Zombies mode. Lucius explained that there is an explanation that makes sense for the story.
But the issue is, Zombies mode is so different from either the franchise’s conventional story campaign, or the multiplayer, that it was a jarring experience for Lucius Ignatius. He felt that he would not be able to move forward unless he actually went into Zombies mode and mastered it.
Lucius says he is flustered and confused about whether it could be his own playing that is the issue, or if it’s a bug with the difficulty scaling that Activision could patch in time. But as he explains it, the way Zombies mode was added in feels discordant to how Call of Duty’s single player campaigns usually fell like.
It was here that the host K Asante shared an interesting insight. He heard from an episode of the official Xbox podcast that the developers are planning around lapsed players who may have forgotten or missed out on Zombies mode completely.
So, they incorporated it into the main game to introduce or reintroduce these modes to those lapsed or new players. K Asante also implies that the developers were specifically planning around new or returning players who are coming in from a Game Pass subscription.
Given that this Call of Duty was in development for four years, it sounds like this was added in relatively recently. So even this early, Activision is already making changes to their games with their new status as a first-party Microsoft developer in mind.
We’ll find out in time if the way Activision shoehorned it in would be received well by gamers, or if they’ll mostly feel like Lucius Augustus is. Subsequently, we’ll need a few days to see if it will affect reviews and meta scores like MetaCritic. Most importantly, Microsoft will want to see if it works in getting lapsed and new players trying these other modes.
But one can see the merits of this choice as both a business decision and a creative decision. We imagine Treyarch and Raven are proud of everything they built in this game and want the players to try all of it. If they succeed in getting more players to try out Zombies, will al of this have been worth it? Could it be the new normal for future Call of Duty games? These are the things worth looking out for as we gauge Call of Duty: Black Ops 6’s success and impact.
