We’ve seen some unique approaches to arachnophobia modes in video games as they’ve started to become more common in recent years, but nothing quite like Call of Duty: Black Ops 6’s new approach. Activision’s solution somehow makes everything even more horrifying, by robbing its zombie spiders of legs and turning them into something arguably worse.
“For the first time in Black Ops 6 Zombies, a new arachnophobia toggle feature will be available,” Activision writes in a post outlining Black Ops 6’s new accessibility features over on its blog. “This setting will allow players to change the appearance of spider-like enemies in Zombies without affecting their game play.”
All of which sounds perfectly reasonable and good. After all, arachnophobia modes are far from unusual these days, even if their approaches are rarely the same. Developer Coffee Stain opted to replace spiders with adorable pictures of cats in Satisfactory, for instance, while Obsidian’s Grounded – a game positively bursting with the things – let players dial the spider details all the way back to ‘innocuous circle’. Dragon Age: The Veilguard’s solution, meanwhile, is a little more scorched-earth, simply eradicating the game’s spider population entirely.
Black Ops 6 developer Treyarch’s approach to the spider problem, however, is something else entirely, with the studio having seemingly taken Obsdian’s ‘floating blob’ solution as a starting point by removing its zombie arachnids’ legs and then, well, stopped there. Which would be fine if the end result – a sort of giant mutated shrimp? Sperm?! – wasn’t somehow more upsetting. Still, at least the nightmares won’t be spider nightmares, I guess?
Elsewhere in its post, Activision spotlights a couple of other interesting new accessibility features for the Call of Duty series, including asymmetrical hearing compensation settings – enabling players to create custom audio profiles and adjust separate settings for each ear. Which, speaking as someone who’s had lop-sided hearing since a childhood run-in with a lake, is something I’d definitely love to see more games adopt!
Black Ops 6 also includes an expanded High Contrast mode designed to assist players with vision impairment or colour blindness by letting them toggle a ‘dark background’ setting or customise outline colours for allies and enemies. This, of course, proved to be a surprise for some players at launch after they switched on the game only to discover everyone was blue.
Additionally, Black Ops 6 features what Activision is calling Intelligent Movement, intended to help players with mobility issues reduce inputs by minimising and customising button and stick processes. That’s alongside new HUD customisation features, used to switch between layout pre-sets and adjust minimap colours, plus support for the Xbox Adaptive Controller and Sony Access Controller. It’s also now possible to pause and save during solo Zombies matches.
Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 is available now on PC, PlayStation 4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S, and Game Pass – and there’s already plenty of chatter from analysts about what its day one launch Game Pass launch will mean for the future of Microsoft’s subscription service.