Black Ops 6 Developers are worried omni-movement could ruin the game for casuals

Black Ops 6 multiplayer beta is out now and lots of players have been talking about how wild the new omnidirectional movement is. You can dive and slide in any direction while sprinting, allowing for some Max Payne style moments.

Last week we attended CoD NEXT in Washington D.C and spoke to Matt Scronce (Associate Design Director at Treyarch) and Yale Miller (Senior Director of Production at Treyarch) to get all the little details of this year’s Call of Duty multiplayer.

Watch some brand new Black Ops 6 gameplay here:

Six iterations of one franchise is a lot, what makes black ops 6 multiplayer stand out from the rest?

We want to give players those superhero moments and we always want to let the player become the action hero in their own kind of movie. In Black Ops 6, omni-movement is a great tool for you to feel like an action hero.

It may not always work out for you but you're always going to look cool when you do it, right? When we talk about the Special Sauce or what it means to be a great Black Ops game, movement was a big one that always came up for us. It's fast, it's fluid, it's guns up gameplay where you feel like an action hero.

Do you think omni-movement may increase the skill gap between the best players and those looking for a casual experience after work?

Yes, It's something that we've talked about from the beginning, but we've also done a lot of testing and play. We just brought some of the best players in the world to play against each other. And then on the other hand, we’ve had players completely new to Call of Duty, or even new to first-person shooters play and they pick up omni-movement very quickly.

Let's see what happens. The reality of that stuff is that you're gonna see a huge skill gap regardless. What we've seen is that the satisfaction is there still, which is the most important thing, right? Because it still feels good to play and run around.

We’ve worked a lot on simplifying things this time around. What are the things that happen the most? Death. It happens a lot and it happens even more for people who aren't very good at the game. It's like, can we make it (death) look cooler, make it more interactive? Hopefully, you know, it's about getting people to play long enough that they start to get better.

From the design side, it would be naive of me to say that it [omni-movement skill gap] hasn't been a focus. That said, it would be naive of me to say it's not a concern.

I'd like to say we've widened the style gaps, right? Like you can dive through a window and turn around backwards and land on your back. You've still go to hit the shots, right? We've specifically done user tests mixing current Call of Duty players and those who haven’t played in years to see what happens. We got their feedback and they've consistently said that sure, there's a skill gap but it's not because of omni, it's because accuracy and things like that. So all that said, we’ve got the beta in two days: we're going to hear a lot; we're gonna get a lot of data and we're prepared to react to that.

It's also interesting to see, when people first played and they're CoD players, they wanted to try all the omni-movement stuff. Like, 'I'm gonna dive through every window I'm gonna do this' but actually, as they start to play more, it kind of evens out that usage because it's less of a novelty and it just becomes more of a tool that you can use.

Activision

CoD multiplayer has got significantly more complicated over the years. From picking a few perks and adding a silencer to your gun to almost needing a degree in weapon tuning. Do you think there’s still a place for a simple arcade-style game or has that time gone now?

That was a big goal for us with Black Ops 6, right? It's like, let's streamline, let's make it more approachable. Let's go back to perk one, perk two, perk three, but can we do something a little more interesting with it with our Combat Specialities?

I'm a big Diablo fan, right? In Diablo, they have set bonuses where if you find certain pieces of a set and then you get this little bonus. So that was kind of the inspiration of Combat Specialities.

With attachments, it’s a big one where we've simplified it, we've streamlined and for the most part, you're not going to have any cons with attachments and it's just about how do you want to build this weapon for the better.

We thought about how we can reduce the amount of time it takes to get to the fun.

You’re bringing classic prestige back, was that an easy call to make?

No, no, no, no. Again, I'll keep calling back to it - if you want to make the best Black Ops game, what are the pieces? There's theatre mode, there's ‘best play’ and then there's prestige.

There were many, many, many, many conversations on bringing back traditional prestige. Well, it would be awesome but how does that work in 2024? So no, it wasn't an easy call but for us, it felt like we had to do it.

Even when we realised we really wanted to do it and imagined how it would work in multiplayer, we had to then think about zombies - how does that work? And then what about Warzone? We hope it will give players reason to try out other content.

Back in the day, you didn’t get too much when you prestige - perhaps an emblem or something but now if we want players to proceed again we need to make it a no-brainer. So that's where Black Ops 6 prestige comes in. For example, this is the first time in a prestige system where you're going to keep all of your weapon progression even after you prestige.

Activision

You can speak to your body shield live in-game which is very funny, can you talk to me about that?

The first time we heard about that pitch and talked about it, some of the animation leads came to my office and said “This is never going to work, you need to stop this.” Some of our online engineers came to my office and said, “You don't understand how complex this is, because of all the networking code.”

Lots said that people are gonna hate that they're trapped but I said “What if, it could be cool, it could be cool.”

It was a bit of blue sky design. If I could get everything I wanted in the game, this would be it.

That's where some of my favourite ideas come from. Where if the team is excited about something, let's run it through the gamut of the design and make sure it works out.

It’s all about the action with this feature and it's also fun because it just gives another chase moment. Imagine you're behind someone in a 1v1 situation in Search and Destroy - do you go straight for the kill or have a bit of fun with the body shield feature? Tell them directly you’re going to defuse the bomb to their face. It’s fun.

From our time with the game, we’re pleased to say that pretty much everything Matt and Yale talk about feels true. It’s much simpler to create a class and the new gameplay features make movement much more fluid without being too much.

Black Ops 6 is out on all platforms 25 October.