Pee-ew. What is that smell? If I didn’t know better, I’d say another FPS is littering the pond with brightly colored skins. But it can’t be the Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 I’m sensing – that game just came out 1.5 weeks ago, surely it’s too early for its newfangled military style to be bombarded with glowing demon armor, streetwear buddies in gold skull masks and a guy with tree sap for a face and knives for arms?
Ah, nuts:
These are just some of the proposals for the first season of Black Ops 6, which will start on November 14. That means I only have seven more days to play a version of Black Ops 6 that matches the look of the box – military operators, spies, and armored grunts dashing across maps where everyone looks like they belong. With the exception of the Vault Edition zombie skins, which are already haunting my lobby with their awfulness, the first week of Black Ops 6 is the most artistically consistent Call of Duty in years.
I didn’t think much of it before taking a look at the contents of the upcoming Battle Pass, but the look of Call of Duty for a change of Call of Duty is the main reason why BLOPS 6 impresses me. But the clown show comes for all of us.
I really miss the days when “Mastercraft” sets, high-end Call of Duty cosmetics at eye-watering prices, focused on crafting ridiculous weapons. When BLOPS Cold War got a submachine gun that was also a tape recorder that played music, I jumped at it. In my opinion, weapons are perfect for expression in FPS games – from my point of view, the weapon is the largest and most noticeable element on the screen, but other players do not succumb to my questionable taste until I hand them the kill camera.
Honestly, it’s not the Mastercraft kits that give off the worst smell. The real problem is battle pass padding – the less explicit, thinly veiled palette swaps that games routinely place in the middle pages of a 100-tier battle pass to maintain the illusion of value. No one actually wants these things, but you manage to create something better and equip them while you’re there, because why not? I’m talking about bargain bin makeovers where none of the colors match, I’m talking about making random things glow to make suckers believe it’s something special, I’m talking about this garbage:
Rotten. Well, these things are obviously popular, so I’m not going to change where the wind blows.
However, I have to believe that the talented artists creating these skins see value in thematic consistency – why else would they make a normal human operator the face of every season when they could have played Fortnite years ago? The standard Operator you get with the Season 1 Pass, Sevati “Sev” Dumas from the BLOPS campaign, looks amazing.
I’m not a “buy the $10 Battle Pass” coward, but I’d consider spending a few dollars on a special switch that makes everyone else look like one of the default Black Ops 6 skins. That’s innovation.
