Call of Duty: Black Ops 7’s beta starts today for those lucky few with early access, while the open beta will begin in a few days on October 5. Expectations may be pretty low—thanks in no small part to Battlefield 6—but even still, the devs over at Treyarch are determined to put their best foot forward.
One of the big takeaways from Black Ops 7’s beta will be community sentiment, whether players are generally happy with what Treyarch has put out this year or whether the devs will have their hands full with complaints flooding in.
“There are a lot of fans out there from our community who do give us a lot of constructive feedback, and we really appreciate it,” Miles Leslie, associate creative director, says in an interview with GamesRadar. “We welcome all constructive feedback—’constructive’ being the key thing there. To be quite honest with you, we will be looking at everything.
“Sometimes it’s not immediate, because these things are complex and we want to make changes in the right way. But we are constantly looking at feedback—from beta into launch, launch into post-launch, we’ll always be looking for ways to make the game better for players.”
One example that associate design director Lawrence Metten raises is how the team monitored and implemented perk changes, specifically how perks were distributed in create-a-class after a big change to Omnimovement.
“If you want Tac-Sprint, then you can take the ‘Tac Sprinter’ Perk,” design director Matt Scronce explains. “If you want to move a little faster, then we’ve got lightweight, and if you want to ADS while sliding, diving, or wall jumping, then you can take the Dexterity Perk. We’ve already made adjustments to these that are going to be in the beta build as we really try to nail our Perk distribution.”
I’m sure the devs will be paying as much attention to community feedback as possible—that’s not the issue. I just don’t know how much Treyarch can fix in a little over a month. While Leslie isn’t too perturbed at the ever-shrinking timeline, saying that it’s “1000%” possible to enact changes, I think the overwhelming rise of Battlefield 6 proves this wrong.
The shortcomings of recent COD games have been pretty clear as far as I’m concerned—the vibes have just been off. Whether this is a symptom of Activision shilling out game after game every year with seemingly less care each time, or the fact that the shop with its wacky collab skins seems to rule the roost now, it feels like players have been asking for a reset for some time now, and the request just isn’t getting through.
Just look at this year’s COD Next that served up countless ads, weird manufactured hype, and ultimately showcased a stagnant game, as staff writer Morgan Park said, it showcased “everything wrong with Call of Duty.”
And as if that wasn’t enough, Battlefield 6 has somehow managed to swoop in and take COD’s lunch money by shining a glaring light on all of these issues. Players took one look at what DICE was putting out this year and had a Ratatouille flashback to rival all others: Going back to a time before every live service game continuously tried and failed to be a Fortnite.
So my worry isn’t that Treyarch will avoid the little pitfalls by tweaking perks or balancing weapons—it’s that in doing so, it’ll completely miss the fact that it currently stands at the bottom of a chasm.
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