Black Ops 6 leak gives naughty players access to the Max Payne-ish omnimovement system for the first time

I don’t play much Call Of Duty anymore. My feelings about the series have settled back from self-righteous fury over its Pentagon-sponsored war-fellating to a quieter, regretful sense that there have maybe been enough Call Of Duty games now, and that it would be nice if we could fill that infamous late October/early November release slot with, I don’t know, games about witches instead, or maybe just turn it into a public holiday and spend the week lying on a mattress regarding the ceiling. Still: I’ve skinned and filleted enough COD in my time to know that Black Ops 6‘s new “omnimovement” system is going to ruffle as many feathers as it smooths. The short version is that it turns you into Max Payne.

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As the cumbersome moniker suggests, omnimovement is all about 360 degree responsiveness. It lets you sprint, dive and slide in any direction at the drop of a bullet casing, and lets you rotate freely while prone in the bargain. It sits alongside some new assists – you can set your character to mantle and sprint automatically, and there’s a new “corner-slicing” gimmick that sees you peeking around surfaces automatically while aiming.

The idea, Activision claim, is to make the game both look and feel more “fluid” rather than simply upping the tempo. “It was never a goal with Omnimovement to just make things fast,” associate design director Matt Scronce told Comicbook.com in June. “This isn’t the fastest Call of Duty game. Our average speeds – because you can sprint in any direction, and on average, you’re probably sprinting a little bit more – are a little bit higher. But it was never about making things fast.” Perhaps not, but it looks like it’s going to give some players the edge at close quarters. Possibilities include diving through windows and rotating as you land to headshot the poor sucker who thought they were ambushing you.

A development build of Black Ops 6 leaked this week, and verdicts and footage are flooding in from unscrupulous sorts who’ve gotten hold of the goods. I won’t post any of that filth here, for Activision’s lawyers are ever-watchful, but I’ll briefly paraphrase the reactions I’ve read, which run the expected gamut. Some are calling it the second coming of the exosuits introduced by Advanced Warfare. Some compare it favourably to Quake. Some compare it unfavourably to Quake.

There are the usual concerns that the new movement suite will empower or disempower community favourite playstyles or techniques: omnimovement appears to have wrought the ignoble end of slide-cancelling, for example, though this may just be a limitation of the dev build. There are suggestions that omnimovement will create a new skill gap – omnimovement certainly seems built for showboating pros and their streaming audiences. Pretty much everybody I’ve read agrees it’ll take time to bed in, perhaps more time than is usual for a new COD quirk. I’m curious to know what the duty-callers of the RPS commentariat make of such things. We’ll have more to say at the end of the month, if not before – the Black Ops 6 beta begins on Friday August 30th for selected players.