I don’t play much Call Of Duty anymore. My feelings about the series have diminished from self-love and anger over its Pentagon-sponsored fellating war to a quieter, more mournful feeling that maybe there have been enough Call Of Duty games already, and that it would be nice if we could fill that infamous delayed October/early November with, I don’t know, witch games, or maybe just turn it into a holiday and spend the week lying on a mattress staring at the ceiling. Still: I’ve skinned and filleted enough COD in my time to know that Black Ops 6’s fresh “omnimovement” system will ruffle as many feathers as it smooths. In tiny, it turns you into Max Payne.
As the awkward name suggests, omnimovement is a 360-degree responsiveness. It lets you sprint, dive, and slide in any direction at the moment a projectile is fired, and also lets you turn freely while prone. This is in addition to a few fresh assist features—you can set your character to automatically cover and sprint, and there’s a fresh “corner cutting” trick that lets you automatically peek around surfaces while aiming.
The idea, Activision says, is to make the game look and feel more “fluid,” rather than just augment the pace. “It was never the goal of Omnimovement to just speed things up,” said deputy design director Matt Scronce told Comicbook.com in June. “It’s not the fastest Call of Duty game. Our average speeds — because you can sprint in any direction, and on average you probably run a little bit more — are a little higher. But it was never about making everything faster.” Maybe not, but it looks like it will give some players an advantage in close-quarters combat. Options include diving through windows and spinning on landing to headshot the destitute sucker who thought he had ganked you.
The development build of Black Ops 6 leaked this week, and the verdicts and footage are pouring in from the dishonest types who got their hands on the goods. I won’t post any of that crap here, since Activision’s lawyers are ever vigilant, but I’ll briefly paraphrase the reactions I’ve read, which are in the expected range. Some are calling it the second coming of the exoskeletons introduced by Advanced Warfare. Some are comparing it positively to Quake. Some are comparing it negatively to Quake.
There are the usual concerns that a fresh moveset will either reinforce or weaken the community’s favorite playstyles or techniques: for example, omnimovement seems to have the ignominious end of canceling slides, although that may just be a dev-build limitation. There are suggestions that omnimovement will create a fresh skill gap – omnimovement certainly seems built for the show-off pros and their streaming audiences. Almost everyone I’ve read agrees that it will take some time to settle in, perhaps longer than usual for a fresh COD oddity. I’m curious to hear what the regular RPS commentators think about things like this. We’ll have more to say later this month, if not sooner – the Black Ops 6 beta starts on Friday, August 30 for select players.
