Black Ops 6 reveals movement buffs, spawn improvements & headshot damage increase

Ahead of the official Black Ops 6 launch date, Treyarch dropped a massive blog going over community-requested changes in the game.

Two weeks of beta action provided plenty of time to form first impressions. After testing eight of the 16 maps, players expressed concerns that they are too small and don’t suit 6v6 matches. The development team reassured fans that most of the 12 core 6v6 maps at launch are medium-sized.

Complaints also targeted inconsistent spawns for ruining the multiplayer experience. Ahead of the second beta weekend, the BO6 developers tuned spawn placement and confirmed there would be more improvements before launch.

PC players also slammed the beta as an “absolute mess” as significant crashing and performance problems made it challenging to log in and play matches. Treyarch confirmed that the team was able to locate the source of in-game “hitching” and made major fixes ahead of launch.

Full Black Ops 6 multiplayer update patch notes

Activision

Here are all of the changes mentioned in the blog post.

Headshot Damage

We were so excited to see our new weapons in the hands of players throughout the Beta and are grateful to have plenty of data and feedback to process as we look to balance updates for launch. 

A common piece of feedback we saw was that low headshot damage reduced the impact of skillful play and made it difficult to challenge certain power positions. We agree with these points and are working on adjustments to many weapons to reward players who land multiple headshots during an engagement. That said, we do not want hit location multipliers to significantly affect the consistency of time to kill in Black Ops 6, so we will continue to monitor the effectiveness of headshots during launch and beyond.

Bullet Penetration

Bullet Penetration is another system that we will be improving for launch. In general, players should notice fewer extreme cases of bullets doing far too much damage through certain surfaces (AKA Wall Bang), while also not penetrating as expected through others (e.g., those pesky snipers behind the radar dish on Scud).

More to Come

And of course, we continue to review data and feedback regarding general weapon feel and tuning, and we’re always keeping tabs on overall weapon class balance in the context of our entire map pool. Some specific changes coming at launch include:

• Improvements to the fluidity of sniper ADS
• Improved fluidity when swapping weapons during sprint and tactical sprint. We’re excited about this one!
• Reduction of weapon motion during crouch transitions
• Small lift to shotguns and targeted adjustments across all weapons to keep SMGs from over-performing relative to other classes

Weapon balance is an ongoing process and something we’re working towards at every point in our live seasons. We’ll be sharing specific details about balancing in our launch Patch Notes.

Movement Updates 

• Continued improvements to animation fluidity and fidelity throughout
  • We identified several areas for improvement to our 3rd Person animation fidelity across slide, dive, jump, and supine prone. Our goal is that what you see in 1st Person is representative of what others see in 3rd Person in order to maintain immersion and predictability. 
• Adjustments to slide for improved predictability and fluidity
  • During Weekend 2 of the Beta, we increased the time before you could enter supine during a slide. After further assessment based on your feedback, we’ve reduced that time to find a nice middle ground between where we were in Beta Weekend 1 and Weekend 2. 
  • Reduced the minimum time to slide after sprinting to prevent accidentally crouching when intending to slide, also known as a “dead slide.”  
  • Slight reduction to maximum slide duration. 
• Intelligent Movement updates
  • As a reminder, you can find our suite of Intelligent Movement settings in the Movement tab under the Controller or Keyboard & Mouse settings. These settings are broken down by Sprint Assist, Mantle Assist, and Crouch Assist with the intention of letting you fine-tune your experience with the result of requiring drastically fewer inputs with basic movement and Omnimovement in Black Ops 6. 
  • We identified an issue in Beta with the additional settings for Mantle Assist that allows for further tuning of directional mantles. These have been resolved and should now behave as expected. 

Winner’s Circle 

• Shortened overall duration of Winner’s Circle.
• To reduce Emote spam, players in the Winner’s Circle will now only be able to activate 1 Emote.
• Simplified the Emote menu to make it easier to activate Emotes in the Winner’s Circle and in-game.
• Improvements to fidelity and lighting.

Kill Counter 

• By popular demand, we’ve added a Kill Counter on your HUD that will track your progress toward Kills-in-one-life Medals, including those who are chasing the coveted Nuclear Medal and Nuke Scorestreak.  

Camera Motion 

• We’re reducing overall camera motion on sprint, tac sprint, and slide.

Kill Order 

• Increased ‘Kills as HVT’ team score to 3.
• Reduced ‘HVT Survival’ score to 20.
• Increased Score Limit to 150.
• HVT will no longer drop their pistol when they are eliminated.
• Improved notifications when a player is selected as HVT.

Sleeper Agent 

• Removed the time added when earning Eliminations while Sleeper Agent is active.

Equipment 

• Stim Shot has been changed from Inventory Based to Cooldown Based by default.  
• Quartermaster (Strategist) will decrease the cooldown time.  
• Resolved an issue where the Combat Axe would not deal lethal damage at round start. It wouldn’t be a Black Ops game if you can’t hit those cross-maps at match start! 

Perks 

• After assessing Perk data from our time with the Beta, we’ve made a few updates to ensure compelling decisions are being made:
  
  • Assassin (Enforcer) and Bruiser (Enforcer) moved from Perk 1 to Perk 2
  • Dexterity (Enforcer) and Gung Ho (Enforcer) moved from Perk 2 to Perk 1 

RC-XD Controls 

• Updated to classic BO view-based control by default, with an option to switch to gas/brake; on the controller, detonate swapped from R2 to R1 so accidental mistakes aren’t made.