Treyarch has announced they have two Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 modes ready to be added this week.
The official Treyarch Twitter account made this announcement:
“Launch was only the beginning.
Tomorrow, the Infected are coming to play. Nuketown joins the party on Friday.
LFG.”
Infected is a game mode that adds survival elements to Call of Duty’s base military shooter. At the start of every match, one of the players is designated as infected. The other players then need to kill the infected, lest they get infected themselves. These matches end either when everyone is infected, or the time runs out.
This was originally a community creation that got so popular that it was added as a frequent, if not regular, part of the franchise. And sometimes the players didn’t like how the mode is implemented for the latest release. Of course, that won’t deter them from asking the developers to bring it back.
On the other hand, Nuketown is a map that was originally introduced in the very first Call of Duty: Black Ops all the way back in 2010. This map is inspired by the nuclear testing that the US did in Nevada during the Cold War.
So, much like a nuclear test town from that time, the map is a fake town filled with mannequin townspeople, as well as fake buildings and some vehicles. For the purposes of gameplay, Nuketown is symmetrical across two sides, putting both teams on onstensibly equal footing.
Of course, Nuketown is one of the most important maps in the franchise as a whole. It’s often been the subject of commentary for how it makes players think about the cold war and nuclear weapons. On another level, it’s just a very popular map to play in.
Both Infected and Nuketown were announced to have been delayed, so it’s good that Treyarch didn’t have to take that long to add them onto the game. Given Call of Duty’s online nature, one can argue that it really isn’t that big a deal that this content had to be patched in.
Gamers who make the argument that games are ideally complete on disc also have had to reckon for years now that Activision has been shipping Call of Duty discs as mainly installers. Maybe that’s a policy that could change in the future under Microsoft, but here and now, this is simply the normal state of AAA video games in 2024.