Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 is not Brat
Activision's shooter is more interested in bring all things to all people than being interesting, more Taylor Swift than Charli XCX
There's no dopamine hit quite like a Call of Duty dopamine hit. On Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 launch day I chewed through four players and was greeted with a guitar riff congratulating me on a quad kill. Then a second guitar riff kicks in to celebrate the remote-controlled car loaded up with explosives I just earned. Or maybe the cosmetics I've just gotten. Or the level up.
Call of Duty: Black Ops 6, like the Call of Duty games that came before it, is more interested in making sure that every single player is having a good time than doing anything truly out there. Of course, it's still a blast. I'm currently away from my PC for work but I'm excited about getting back and dropping back onto the treadmill of endless unlocks as soon as I'm back. I'm not proud. I'm also at 223 / 300 survives, if you're tracking my Escape From Tarkov PMC achievement agony from last week.
Mashing the pause button for a second to give a special welcome to new yearly subscribers Ryan and Karl. Hit Reload is only a couple of paid year-long subscribers away from covering the email costs for the year, and this means I need to work out a proper paid tier offering, but for now, I appreciate the vote of confidence as I say weird stuff about shooters week in, week out.
I've played other shooters this week – some embargoed, some not – but by far the most fun I had was playing Straftat with a handful of PC Gamer editors, battling in first-to-two-round matches while the others watched on a Discord stream. I can categorically tell you Straftat is one of the best games I've played all year, but also that the fact there's no in-built lobby system to facilitate this drop-in-drop-out gunplay is a damn travesty. But either way, I am very much enjoying Straftat. And it's free. Play it.
Otherwise, it's been all Call of Duty: Black Ops 6, all the time. The campaign has some cool ideas and goes to some weird places thematically. I don't want to spoil anything, but it is pretty clear the developers Activision has locked away at Treyarch are more interested in making cool immersive sims than Call of Duty. You can feel the game pushing that way in the perk system, dialogue screens and even some pretty smartly designed puzzles.
If you're video game literate, the game is well constructed but not groundbreaking. But, Call of Duty often breaks containment and is played by people who don't play a bunch of games, so it should be applauded for introducing a lot of these concepts to people who only duck into this and whatever EA football game is released that year. But, despite the push in a fun direction, Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 still feels like design by committee, a game has had its edges shaved down, friction eased, and design made easier to grasp in every area.
365 Shootyguy
Call of Duty is pop music - designed to be enjoyed by anyone - but it's the safest possible pop music. It's Taylor Swift, a monolithic cultural force that can define the rest of the year around it. Its structured approach is miles away from Charli XCX's well-deserved Brat summer, a celebration of chaos and feral behaviour that's redefined the colour green and given us an easy shorthand for a chaotic kind of cool, at least for a short while until it fades from public consciousness.
But Call of Duty has to be carefully structured. The franchise has had more than a couple of high-profile failures in the 21 years since the franchise started, and it's not just a game at this point: the launch consists of midnight release parties, Tiktok collaborations, and star-studded Twitch tournaments. The games themselves are developed in tandem amongst several different studios to ensure they can pump them out on time every year. With the survival of entire studios wrapped up in the brand deals and post-launch microtransaction revenue, failure is no longer an option.
And if you want bankable, you stay with what works at the expense of trying to add some flavour that could turn some people away. This is why Call of Duty, trapped by its own success and the weight of expectations, seems like it will now always be a conservative franchise: you do not want to mess with the money. This isn't an indictment on quality: Taylor Swift has some great music and Call of Duty still boasts some astounding moments. But it's not very Brat and makes the franchise feel a little sluggish, despite how pretty everything looks.
Brat is Titanfall 2's wall running, Timeshift's time-dilation grenades or even Cruelty Squad's whole... everything. Weird touches that make the experience feel truly unique, even if they have the chance to impact the mass appeal. Brat, as I'm choosing to interpret it to video games, is some flair that marks a game out as truly different, something with a bit of edge that shifts the paradigm around the genre, if only for a little while.
There's space for the weird in pop music and in games, but it doesn't feel like there's space for Call of Duty to get properly weird, even though it flirts with it. It takes some swings, but the swings are safe. Even the will they / won't they controversy about whether the game will do a 9/11 level feels toothless now that Gen Z treats it like a meme.
And while I wish I could see what a chaotic big budget shooter will look like, in a time when games are more expensive to make than ever, people are being laid off in the industry at an alarming rate and the audience is spending less time on new games, it seems difficult to imagine anyone else taking a swing. If Activision isn't willing to fund a bold new experiment (the sort of thing that saw the franchise jump from the terrible console exclusive Call of Duty 3 to Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare for example) then who will?
I'll still play Call of Duty each year and I'll get back to Black Ops 6 as soon as I'm back at my desk. Regardless, the game's multiplayer feels aggressively fine, playable mostly because it feels like slipping into a warm bath with all of your killstreaks and perks right where you left them.
There are minor changes each time. One change this time around seems to be that I keep spawning in the eyeline of the player that just shot me, but overall everything feels about the same as it ever was. The promised omnimovement doesn't change the game as promised and merely lets me sprint left and right, and the jingoistic politics are the same as ever.
Through it all, I'm thrown into zombie levels or motorbike chases, or taking the minigun in a hovering chopper to take out enemy players below. The game so desperately wants you to like it, seems so eager to make sure I'm having fun every second. And I am having fun. But nothing more substantial. Call of Duty feels like an empire in decline.
And of course, while building the newsletter I just saw that classic map Nuketown is coming this week for Black Ops 6 because hey, it's what the fans want, right?
Out this week
Another quiet week, but most publishers are giving Activision a minute after Call of Duty. Horizon Zero Dawn Remastered isn't even really a shooter, but if you want to hunt robot dinosaurs with a bow and arrow, you don't have many other options. It's fun but inessential.
Elsewhere, it's a thin week, with a few co-op horror games and two (count 'em) horror Backrooms games. I might have missed something though, last week I missed Moon Mystery, which came out Tuesday. I have questions. Questions about how that astronaut is using an armalite design assault in space. Anyway, keep the faith – Stalker 2 is out in November.
Horizon Zero Dawn Remastered (PC, PS5) - October 31st
Gibs
- Jeremy Peel is always sublime, and his writing about Sonar Shock is excellent. Sonar Shock sort of passed me by, but i'm thinking I should give it a go. He also wrote a retrospective on the original STALKER, so why not treat yourself to double Peel?
- The first issue of On looks like it could be something quite special.
- Hunt: Showdown 1896 just added a Ghostface cosmetic, and Call of Duty has launched with multiplayer skins that will let you play as a weird android or a zombie Alcatraz guard, so it's time to tap the sign once again.
- This is a good read on Fortnite & architecture.