A huge scary bearded man has just kicked down my door. His face and shoulders are doused in tactical Dorito dust. His eyes are heavily redacted. He’s got assault rifles and comparison screenshots poking out of his ribcage, which are making an absolute mess of the hallway plaster. He says he is Call Of Duty Man, and he is here to let me know about Black Ops 6’s day one patch. The new Activision FPS is out tomorrow 25th October, I gather. Call Of Duty Man speaks only in three-syllable bursts and rolling bombardments, but I think if I listen carefully I can make out the highlights. Here’s what that patch involves, in nickel-plated bulletpoint form.
– They’ve been fiddling around with the aim assists. During the Black Ops 6 beta, developers Treyarch tried turning off aim assist when firing at close range, but players found this disorienting. “While this was a change in the right direction, we felt that this was a bit jarring when crossing that close range threshold, so we’ve adjusted our approach to linearly interpolate aim assist strength,” Call Of Duty man roars in my ear. “This means that aim assist will be much weaker at point blank ranges and smoothly increase in strength out to a short range. We will of course continue to monitor and assess data and player feedback.”
GOOD STUFF. They’ve also accelerated pistol/dedicated melee swap speeds and weapon butt melee attacks, while making “adjustments to sway, bob and overall weapon motions to improve point of aim when entering ADS”. There are some new movement options, too, such as being able to change how long you need to hold a button when diving to prone or sliding.
– They’ve made stealthy tweaks to the map furniture. In particular, a ferocious amount of time and energy has been lavished on the hot tub area on Skyline – lowering the platform behind it, adding some extra steps, swapping out the old balcony loungers for some relatively unrelaxing deckchairs. At a glance, the only thing they’ve forgotten about is the ability to fill up the hot tub and sit in it, which I, personally, would consider optimal escapism.
What’s more, Skyline now has a janitor, as evidenced by the cleaning trolley that has materialised in one corridor. I was a janitor once and let me tell you, if somebody had tried hiding behind my trolley with an AK I’d have drenched them in mop water. Less dramatically, local hooligans have been messing with the crates and barrels on Scud, and whoever left that pick-up in the disabled parking space on Rewind has finally come back to collect it.
– They’ve beefed up the anticheat. “TeamRICOCHET mitigations live in Black Ops 6 multiplayer, including Damage Shield, Disarm, Splat, and more,” shrieks Call Of Duty Man, punching me in the shoulders. “Machine-learning behavioral systems deployed to increase speed of detection,” he continues, weeping uncontrollably. “Machine-learning detection models added to analyze gameplay combating aim bots.” Hang on, let me pour him a nice restorative cherryade. There there, Call Of Duty Man, I’m sure the aimbots won’t mind if you sit down for five minutes.
– They’re taking a new approach to visualising weapon balance changes. I’m actually quite interested in this one, albeit more as jumping-off point for musings about the culture of game balance at lage. “In the past, our patch notes used some terms to describe damage values at various ranges that could create some mild confusion for some players,” concedes Call Of Duty Man, who is now skulking under my desk (I think he misheard “cherryade” as “grenade”). As such, the developers have created a new weapon damage adjsutment table for future Blops 6 (and Call Of Duty: Warzone) patchnotes.
It’s nothing remarkable in itself – just a couple of columns labelled “before patch” and “after patch”, with rows for damage at different ranges. But one thought it inspires is that discussion of balancing in multiplayer shooters can be quite patch to patch, with minimal sense of a timeline. I wonder if there’s scope for some nice, big graphs here, Treyarch. Show me how the C9 SMG of today has evolved from its distant ancestor, the C9 SMG of six months ago.
There are third-party tools for this, I’m sure, but it would be useful if players and journalists could easily assess the overall evolution of a game’s balance without visiting, I don’t know, IsCODNerfed.com. Perhaps it would make for less toxicity in the community? Perhaps if there’s less toxicity, Call Of Duty Man will stop chewing on my ankle?
(Find the full patch notes here.)