During Microsoft’s Xbox Games Showcase, they unveiled the cover for the next installment in the seemingly endless Call of Duty franchise, set to be a day-one release on their Game Pass subscription service.
The presentation was rather mundane and typical for the series, with the “big reveal” featuring glimpses of gameplay footage interspersed with the usual Michael Bay-style cinematic spectacle. Most of the presentation glossed over the “latest and greatest” technical innovations this new entry has to offer.
The new entry of Call of Duty will feature “revolutionary” updates such as the ability to sprint in any direction, side to side, forwards, and backwards. While not particularly innovative, younger players will likely use this to their advantage in multiplayer matches, much like the popular “slide canceling” technique favored by children in recent years.
Another “revolution” in Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 is a customizable HUD. Though not groundbreaking, some players will appreciate this addition, and thus concludes the new features that you’ll find in this upcoming installment as they’re clearly running out of ideas.
Black Ops 6 is set to release on October 25th. However, the main concerns often arise from the fine print and official blog posts following the livestream reveals, where the terms and conditions are detailed.
It’s worth noting that modern online competitive games, including Call of Duty, have been cracking down on hateful rhetoric in text and voice chats. While Call of Duty in particular leverages AI, trained by the Anti-Defamation League, to monitor in-game voice chat and combat hate speech.
Since the reboot of Modern Warfare in 2019, Call of Duty has become an even more massive global entity. However, this expansion has arguably caused the series to lose its identity.
The franchise is now split into three categories: the single-player campaign, multiplayer mode, and Warzone, a free-to-play battle royale mode. While Warzone has brought new life to the series, it has also led to a decline in content quality.
The latest release was essentially a DLC expansion sold as a full-priced game, with storage requirements exceeding 200GB. This bloat is likely due to Activision’s studios reusing uncompressed assets across all three game modes, a sign of lazy development practices.
Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 aims to be the biggest Call of Duty release ever, and by that I mean storage space. Apparently, Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 is going to weight in at 309.8GB on Xbox Series X/S consoles at launch later this year. Likely that this includes all three game mode portions, that being single-player and its two different forms of online play.
Developers no longer seem bothered to compress and optimize their games, especially with the majority of consumers opting for digital purchases. Physical discs are now little more than installation prompts.
Console gamers will be thrilled to know that this year’s Call of Duty might very well consume their entire console’s SSD. Most PlayStation 5 consoles come with a mere 825GB drive, of which only 667GB is usable. In comparison, Microsoft’s Xbox Series consoles feature a 1TB SSD, offering 802GB of actual storage.
Black Ops 6 demands a hefty 310GB if you choose to install all three major components, although skipping the campaign won’t significantly reduce the size.
Interestingly, the campaign mode highlights how serious Microsoft and Activision are about data monitoring. According to Activision’s official blog, amidst the various editions and pre-order bonuses, there’s a rather ominous discovery about their approach to data management.
Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 will leverage texture streaming across all three of its game modes, hilariously advertised as a means of REDUCING the overall storage space required. Texture streaming is a technique where high-resolution textures are downloaded on-the-fly as needed, instead of being stored locally. This is meant to save storage space, but it introduces other issues.
Because the single-player component of this new game uses texture streaming, you’ll need to maintain a constant internet connection to play the campaign mode. This requirement persists even after you’ve spent an eternity downloading hundreds of gigabytes onto the limited storage your system has left.
While the developers claim this approach will save space, the reality is that it could introduce lag and other issues, and it’s somewhat ironic given the enormous initial download size.
On the plus side, while you will need a constant internet connection to play the game, even in single-player mode, you won’t need a premium subscription like PlayStation Plus or Xbox Live to access this component. How considerate of them.
This means that PC players will also need to maintain a constant internet connection to play Call of Duty: Black Ops 6. Activision has stated that the game will require a hefty 149GB of storage, or just 78GB if Call of Duty Warzone and COD HQ are already installed on your system.
For reference, the “COD HQ” game launcher alone takes up 160GB of storage space for PC gamers, not including any additional packs for Modern Warfare 2 or Modern Warfare 3, speaking of which expect to waste hundreds of gigabytes for a short campaign that can likely be completed in around 4-6 hours with Black Ops 6.
If you thought the enormous storage requirements, the mandatory internet connection for single-player gameplay, or Activision’s partnership with the ADL to monitor in-game hate speech via machine learning were bad enough, there’s more.
In the same blog post discussing the constant internet connection, you’ll find another little gem.
Microsoft has demonstrated that they are more focused on combating “hate speech“ than addressing cheating in gameplay, as they believe hurtful words over the internet warrant severe consequences.
Activision is now imposing ID restrictions on accounts permanently banned from any recent Call of Duty game, including 2019’s Modern Warfare, its sequels, and even Call of Duty Mobile. If you’ve been caught cheating, griefing, boosting, or hurling insults and profanities during gameplay, it’s now possible to be banned across all Call of Duty titles linked via COD HQ.
This means you could be banned across multiple games on your account, forcing you to create a new account and purchase the game again if you’re on PC. Activision also reserves the right to prevent banned accounts from purchasing Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 digitally.
This underscores the harsh reality of being monitored by artificial intelligence and facing significant consequences for any hateful or illicit conduct detected. as game bans moving forward for Call of Duty are now entirely transferable to future and prior releases.
Microsoft is going all out to justify their purchase of Activision by laying off employees, closing studios due to poor Game Pass revenue, and releasing the next Call of Duty via Game Pass on day one, October 25th. Despite these issues, there’s no doubt that this installment will be the most popular game sold this year, as Call of Duty claims that honor almost every year.
Microsoft is effectively giving the game away nearly for free to Xbox and PC players who subscribe to Game Pass. At current prices, the cost of roughly seven months of the subscription matches the retail price of Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 on competing platforms like Sony’s PlayStation 5.
Every single game released on Game Pass has been a financial disaster, and all signs point to Call of Duty following suit. However, given the game’s infamy and Activision’s long-standing strategy of shoveling microtransactions and now indoctrinating children by giving them free pride flag weapon camos, a lower entry price via a subscription service may pay off by encouraging consumers to spend more on in-game COD Points and cosmetic microtransactions.
The franchise has long since lost its appeal for me, as it has for many others. More consumers are waking up and seeing it for what it’s worth every year. Despite all the reasons to avoid Black Ops 6, it will undoubtedly be another “success” story, boasting record microtransactional revenue to scam Activision’s investors.
