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Early reactions to Call Of Duty: Black Ops 6 multiplayer range from frothing dislike through omnimovement hype to our own Ed Thorn’s dead-eyed appraisal that it’s “a good one, I think. Not a bad one. If you like Call Of Duty, you will like this. If you don’t like Call Of Duty, you will not like this.” I feel like we need to emergency-deploy a supply crate of smelling salts, because the sheer OK-ness of Black Ops 6 appears to have tumbled Ed into a stupor.
Perhaps it would be a different story if he’d encountered some of the spawning issues and glitches people are talking about, with players joining games and materialising right into a hail of fire. The players in question include Black Ops 6’s developers, who comically note in the latest Black Ops 6 patch notes that “Yes, we saw ourselves in a Killcam before selecting a Loadout too.” The latest patch seeks to address this, naturally. As regards the campaign side of things, it also resets your safehouse currency to 5000, if you’ve had your single player funds stolen (or multiplied) by technical gremlins.
The fix for players spawning right after joining matches in progress, without the courtesy of a loadout selection screen, sits alongside “general spawn logic tuning across several maps for improved spawning”. In the latest Blopsblog, the developers caution readers that “spawn tuning will be an ongoing process of taking in data, reviewing gameplay and making measured adjustments in the live environment”, adding that “our number one goal is to always provide the safest spawn that we can across all maps and game modes.”
How safe can a spawn point be, before it starts to confer an unfair advantage? I’m interested to read more about how spawn systems work. I picture the Black Ops 6 spawn system as a genetically engineered octopus, floating in a tank over model of each map. The octopus has been specially trained to place spawn points on demand by touching the map with each tentacle, but being an octopus, it sometimes loses interest or decides to chew on a small model of an AC-130 gunship instead. They keep the octopi in the same room as the thousands of monkeys they’ve got trained to typewriters, striving to write the perfect Call Of Duty campaign. It was the blurst of times indeed.
In the room along from the octopi/monkey chamber, there’s a room full of budgerigars who dynamically alter the game’s weapon balancing by screeching “assault rifle”, “submachine gun” and “shotgun” at different volumes. The new patch makes some “early, general changes” to the effective ranges of assault rifles and SMGs. “For ARs, we are pulling in minimum damage ranges and lessening the impact of headshots at close range,” it reads. “SMGs are receiving damage range increases to improve their mid-range effectiveness.”
As for shotguns, shotgun slugs to the body will no longer cause one-hit kills for the foreseeable. The developers say that this particular shotgun attachment “performs better in hip fire than intended” – it’s supposed “to offer an alternate playstyle for shotguns that trades close quarters effectiveness for improved range and precision”.
As noted, the patch also temporarily donates a set portion of safehouse funds to campaign players affected by a glitch that causes “extreme positive or negative currency values”. I do like Black Ops 6’s safehouse. Wish there were more to it, really. I want to be able to play actual tunes on that piano. But I’ll leave it to Brendy to deliver the final verdict, there – he’s been working on our Black Ops 6 campaign review while Ed tackles the multiplayer.
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