Highlights

  • Direct presentation sheds light on the campaign vision for Black Ops 6, focusing on historical and modern aspects of the franchise.
  • Black Ops 6 offers player freedom through dialogue options and multiple approaches in missions, unlike Modern Warfare 3's open combat.
  • Balance is key as Black Ops 6 seeks to avoid the pitfalls of excessive player freedom seen in MW3's non-linear open combat missions.

The run-up to the release of Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 is now primed and ready following the recent Direct presentation for the game, which took place directly after the jam-packed Xbox Games Showcase. The Direct presentation offered some excellent insight into the core vision that Treyarch had during the development of the project, with the campaign for the release paying a lot of respect to the historic and modern identity of the franchise.

Fans were eager to get a better glimpse of the campaign of Call of Duty: Black Ops 6, with most of the prior promotional material for the game concerning its single-player narrative. As expected, the Direct presentation confirmed things like the setting, main characters, and core mechanics of Black Ops 6's story, while also showing the effort that was placed into ensuring player freedom for the mode. While the way that Black Ops 6 is curating player freedom seems like a big positive, recent titles like Modern Warfare 3 showed how quickly this mentality can serve to hurt a title more than it helps it.

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Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 Cannot Repeat the Non-Linear Mistakes of Modern Warfare 3

A huge amount of campaign details for Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 were revealed during the Direct presentation, with a cast of new and familiar characters going off the books to unearth dark secrets in what is described as a gripping spy thriller. Aside from the narrative, Treyarch gave time during the Direct to talk about some of the most interesting mechanics that fans will have at their disposal throughout Black Ops 6's story, and many of them seem centered around player freedom.

For example, the Direct confirmed that Black Ops 6 will see the return of dialogue options for certain moments of its campaign, a feature that was introduced with 2020's Cold War. While some of these speech options were inconsequential in Cold War, some were integral in choosing allegiances and making major decisions, ultimately impacting how the narrative unfolded and ended.

The return of dialogue options in Black Ops 6 is also complimented by how each level is designed, with Treyarch confirming that most missions have multiple avenues of approach that the player can choose from. These choices will range between loud direct combat and stealthier gameplay while allowing new parts of a mission to be explored through multiple playthroughs. These two mechanics combine to give a great level of freedom to the player, but this cannot be taken overboard in the same way that Modern Warfare 3's player freedom did.

Black Ops 6's Player Freedom Must Be Far Removed From Modern Warfare 3's Open Combat Missions

While 2023's Modern Warfare 3 may not have featured meaningful dialogue options or multiple endings, it did feature an extremely ambitious attempt at player freedom through its Open Combat missions. These Open Combat missions played more like Warzone than a traditional CoD campaign mission, ditching linearity in favor of open-world missions with the player having to scavenge for weapons and equipment.

Six out of Modern Warfare 3's 14 campaign missions were Open Combat levels, with the game drawing a lot of criticism for how this took away from the tense set pieces and explosive gameplay that Call of Duty is usually associated with. The short length of Modern Warfare 3's campaign only worsened these criticisms, but the excessive freedom that Open Combat missions provided was one of the campaign's most pressing issues. While it is great to see that Black Ops 6 is harboring player freedom through other avenues like branching narratives and combat approaches, MW3 makes it clear that a balance of linearity still needs to be met.