Last month’s Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 beta didn’t completely sell me on another 12 months of CoD, but the fact that Treyarch is ditching one of its most annoying and disliked weapons gives me some points. Call of Duty will launch for the first time in years no riot shield (as he noticed Dexerto).
Oh, riot shield. The slab of bulletproof glass with a screw-on handle hasn’t appeared in every entry in the series (most recently Black Ops Cold War in 2020), but it has been a staple of the “close combat” category in Call of Duty. decade.
The riot shield’s role in the CoD arsenal is both unique and controversial. Every year this weapon comes out, aged arguments resurface: many feel that a shield that blocks all bullets from the front is terrible for the balance of CoD, because it allows for shoddy melee kills and forces people to have awkward fun with it. Others say that the shield isn’t all that good when it comes to it, and it’s not tough to shed airy on the problem.
Treyarch’s opinion is clear. The riot shield has appeared in various forms in the Black Ops series – most notably in Black Ops 4, where one of the operators carried a shield with a slot for a gun to shoot through – but Black Ops 6 will be the second Treyarch game in a row to omit it entirely above the shields. At least that’s how it looks for now. There’s always the possibility that the shield will appear in a post-launch update between now and October next year, but shield lovers shouldn’t hold their breath.
That’s the shaky nature of playing Call of Duty. We won’t get the riot shield this year, but we will get another set of weird melee options: a baseball bat unlocked at level 52 and, if Treyarch doesn’t change its ways, perhaps an explosive crossbow or ballistic knife next year.
