Battlefield 6 won over massive numbers of first-person shooter players with its launch in early October. But Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 gets its chance at revenge today with the launch of the full game and its flagship multiplayer combat.
Will players prefer the realistic simulation of the modern battlefield with Electronic Arts’ “grounded” approach to multiplayer combat with massive battles? Or will they go for the over-the-top sci-fi combat of arena-based fighting with Black Ops 7?
This is one of those multibillion questions, as Call of Duty generates $1 billion to $1.5 billion a year, while Battlefield 6 has already generated around an estimated 6.5 million in sales, or $455 million relatively early in its sales cycle.
I’ve had a chance to play hours of multiplayer for both games now and I can tell you they are so very different. With Battlefield 6, you can get shot from any direction as soon as you spawn into a match. But you can also command the battlefield in a tank or soar above it in a helicopter or jet.
In Call of Duty, most of the fighting takes place in six-versus-six human player combat matches where you are in constant small arms duels. In Call of Duty, it’s a lot less likely you’ll die at a spawn point when someone shoots you in the back.
There is a 20-versus-20 mode dubbed Skirmish, but it’s a far different feeling from the 32-versus-32 modes in Battlefield 6 games that are on gigantic maps like Mirak Valley. Call of Duty games are more like gunslinger duels or gladiator matches.
But there are some real opportunities to maneuver in Skirmish matches in Black Ops 7, as you can use the grappling hook, exosuit jumps, wall running or wingsuits. Those create a chance to get behind enemy lines and take the enemy by surprise with vertical combat. This is where the science fiction setting of Black Ops 7, set in the year 2035, can give players a fresh experience in the gunfight duels. This year, Battlefield is set in 2027.
EA has advertised Battlefield 6 cinematic moments as the ones that happen “Only in Battlefield,” where players can execute maneuvers like taking down a helicopter with a tank or jumping out of a jet and using a rocket launcher on another plane. Such moments are exceedingly rare in Battlefield. Activision, meanwhile, sees Call of Duty as starring in your own action movie in just about every match.
Of course, the true answer here is that FPS fans are going to play both games, and they may even play fresh titles like ARC Raiders. I know that I am.
But having played hours of multiplayer for both games already, I’ll let you know what the experiences are like.
Activision’s Treyarch, aided by 10 other studios with thousands of developers, made the case that its experience — with 18 multiplayer maps at start, a new round-based Zombies experience, a co-op campaign linked to multiplayer, and the battle royale of Warzone — is the best value for your money.
Hands-on combat experience
In matches where you can expect DAWG robots to appear as Scorestreaks, it pays to equip yourself with an EMP grenade, which uses electric shocks to disable DAWGs or freeze soldiers for a moment.
For lethals, you can also drop Point Turrets down that can do some damage to other players — enough so that you can more easily take them down with fewer shots. Decoy grenades can also trick players into shooting at a dummy character, exposing their positions for counterfire.
For Scorestreaks, I found that the Sentry Turrets were very effective, but DAWGs and the occasional RHINO robot could dominate the battlefield for a moment.
For the LMG, I played with the MK.78 a lot and had a chance to play it with fully leveled-up attachments. I also used the leveled-up VS Recon sniper rifle to score a rare game with 30 kills and 11 deaths.
In the review event, I played modes including Domination, Gunfight, 6v6 Overload, Hardpoint, Team Deathmatch, Kill Confirmed, Skirmish and Search and Destroy.
No skill-based matchmaking?
In the beta test, Activision got rid of one of its more controversial but scientifically defensible matchmaking practices. No more skill-based matchmaking. And it’s likely that it will continue with multiplayer combat after the launch.
In numerous studies and papers, Activision’s teams defended the practice of matching players in multiplayer fights based on skill. They put players with similar skills together. New players could fight new players, and the highest-skilled players could face off in ranked play.
But this time, under the pressure of competition from Battlefield, Activision simply matched players based on the best ping time and let the players go into the fray. This was fantastic for players like me. I was getting more than one kill for every death in the beta, in comparison to one kill for every two deaths at the creator-heavy Call of Duty Next event.
And yet I imagine that new players were very frustrated with the matchmaking that pitted them against veteran players. Those new players or low-ranked players were getting slaughtered, and it probably means they won’t be coming back much. That hurts Call of Duty’s ability to expand to new audiences.
However, it makes the veterans happy. People like me have a better chance of getting high-level Scorestreaks, where you get a temporary boost like a Sentry Gun or DAWG for slaughtering a lot of players in a row. We’ll see how this evolves this season.
A single Call of Duty experience
One of the big changes is that the different parts of Call of Duty are tied together when it comes to global systems and progression. This is one of the fruits of Activision’s efforts to switch to a single game engine shared across all studios.
This means that the co-op campaign, multiplayer, Zombies and Warzone are all connected in progression. This means that you earn experience, or XP, when you play any one of those modes. If you use a gun in co-op and continue to use it in multiplayer, you level up that gun in both experiences. There are Calling Card challenges at launch, daily challenge re-roll and Weekly Challenges starting with Season 01.
All of your XP counts toward your Prestige. There are 55 military levels plus 10 Prestige levels with more rewards to unlock. I think people were a lot happier with the rate of leveling up in Call of Duty in comparison to Battlefield 6. EA had to shorten the time for promotions in Battlefield 6 after player complaints.
For the first time since Black Ops 4, you can also level weapons up with Weapon Prestige. You can get two weapon Prestige levels per weapon plus Weapon Prestige Master, which unlocks 250 additional levels. You can unlock unique Prestige Attachment and camo at Weapon Prestige 1, and then more camos at Weapon Prestige 2 and Master. And you can share your weapon build codes with friend.
The Prestige system is also now a global system, where it aggregates all of your XP. You can customize a weapon and it will show up with those customizations across all of the modes where you use it. And there are weekly challenges that are system wide.
New Omnimovement twists and turns
Activision also made some changes to movement. This one made a lot of fans upset, particularly the ones that like to run around multiplayer maps with a knife, stabbing all the slower players. For the rest of us, it may be a relief.
In this case, Activision is removing the standard tactical sprint feature where you can run really fast and turning it into a perk you have to earn and use a slot for. Activision said it has sped up the baseline sprint speed for more fluid and responsive gameplay. It has also refined core movement.
I noticed in the beta that one player was always doing acrobatic moves around corners, like sliding, wall running, jumping or sliding and shooting. This was Scump, one of the world’s best Call of Duty players, and I realized I was simply outclassed. But it made me think more about pulling a trick or two of my own as I went around corners. And I often made sure that I had a shotgun ready when I was rounding a corner. It made me realize that rounding a corner wasn’t simply rounding a corner. It was a chess match.
“We know we don’t want things to get too vertical and out of frame. We always want it to feel fair when it’s being used against you, but also when you use it yourself,” said Miles Leslie, associate creative director, in an interview with me.
There are new lethals like the pinpoint grenade. Perks include Wildcard systems, and new hybrid combat specialties like Tactician, Scout and Operative.
Last year, Black Ops 6 introduced Omnimovement, a more realistic form of movement where you can dive in multiple directions and spin around on the ground while lying down. This year, it’s scaled back in favor of wall running.
You can run on walls like in Titanfall and now chain three wall runs together, with momentum decreasing after each jump. You can also perform the grenade finish
Scorestreaks, maps and weapons
Players can use the overclock feature, which allows players to upgrade their loadouts and earn overclocks for tactical scopes and Scorestreaks. You can level up Lethals, Tacticals, Scorestreaks and Field Upgrades.
Scorestreaks include the RC-XD (a remote-controlled explosive minicar), the Grave Maker (which can see behind walls before firing off a charged shot), and the DAWG, which is a robot that walks and shoots and takes out incoming enemy projectiles. There’s also a remote robot dubbed Rhino.
There are 30 new weapons available at launch, including 16 never seen before. This gives me a little bit of a red flag, as it can be confusing to get so many new weapons. On the other hand, each weapon will fall into a general category that is easy to understand, like shotguns or assault rifles.
Of the 18 maps,13 are new ones and five are remasters. The new maps include two Skirmish mode maps where 20 players can square off against another 20. A new map will come soon after launch.
If you call in UAVs or counter UAVs, you can score assists and then you can get benefits from that. If you get a bullet kill in stealth, you can stay hidden on the minimap for five seconds. If you use stealth support, any stealth kills you get with a stealth weapon will get you an additional field upgrade.
I am hoping that the game will be fun for snipers with fully leveled-up rifles. That was the one skill I picked up when playing Warzone every day during the pandemic. There’s a new sci-fi weapon dubbed the Quadra-X sniper rifle, unlockable at level 37, which fires four bullets at once. That sounds pretty unfair, but we’ll see how it works.
Conclusion
For me, I don’t really care if Battlefield 6 or Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 is going to be slightly better or slightly worse. I’m going to play them both and play them as much as I can. But a lot of players will have to decide which game they should commit their time to.
It only makes sense that Battlefield 6 will feel fresh to players as it hasn’t had a new experience in four years, while Call of Duty comes out every year.
I think that Battlefield 6 has wonderful multiplayer experiences and a great new battle royale experience in RedSec. But it was pretty weak in terms of the single-player campaign story. Call of Duty, meanwhile, has mixed things up with its unique Endgame gameplay that melds the campaign and multiplayer. It has also added co-op campaign play to give players something new as well.
In that way, I think the games are tied this year. I rate the multiplayer version of Call of Duty at four out of five stars, the same rating I gave to Battlefield 6. But we’ll adjust this rating based on how the multiplayer experience turns out. And I will give a separate score to the single-player/co-op campaign for Call of Duty.
In the meantime, I suggest you get out there and play Black Ops 7, in between sessions with other games like Battlefield 6 and ARC Raiders.
Disclosure: Activision paid my way to Treyarch for the purposes of writing Black Ops 7 stories. I played the game at Treyarch on the PC.