Pee-ew. What is that smell? If I didn’t know better, I’d say another FPS stinks the joint with flashy skins. But it can’t be Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 I smell – that game just came out 1.5 weeks ago, surely too early for its modern military art style to be bombarded by glowing demonic armor, streetwear bros in golden skulls masks, and a guy with tree sap for a face and knives for shoulders?
Ah, nuts:
These are just some of the offers Black Ops 6 season 1starting on November 14. That means I only have seven days left to play a version of Black Ops 6 that matches the front of the box – military operatives, spies and armored grunts plunging into maps where everyone seems to belong. With the exception of the Vault Edition zombie skins that are already haunting my lobbies with their awfulness, the first week of Black Ops 6 is the most artistically consistent Call of Duty has looked in years.
I hadn’t given it much thought before being exposed to the content of this incoming battle pass, but Call of Duty looking like Call of Duty for a change is a big reason why BLOPS 6 clicks with me. But that one clown show coming for us all.
I really miss the days when “Mastercraft” bundles, Call of Duty’s supreme cosmetics with eye-popping price tags, were centered around crafting ridiculous weapons. When BLOPS Cold War got one SMG which was also a cassette deck that played musicI threw in. To me, guns are the perfect limits to expression in an FPS – from my POV, the gun is the biggest and most noticeable element on screen, but other players aren’t exposed to my questionable taste until I serve them a killcam .
Honestly, it’s not Mastercraft bundles that produce the worst smell. Battle pass filler is the real problem – the less distinct, thinly veiled palette swaps that games routinely shove into the middle pages of a 100-tier battle pass to maintain an illusion of value. Nobody really wants this, but you get it on the way to something better, and equip it while you’re at it because why not? I’m talking about bargain packs where none of the colors match, I’m talking about making random elements glow so sissies think it’s special, I’m talking about this junk:
The route. Well, this is obviously popular, so it’s not like I’m going to change where the wind blows.
However, I have to believe that the talented artists pumping out these skins see the value in thematic consistency – why else would they make a normal human operator the face of each season when they could have gone full Fortnite years ago? The default operator you get with the Season 1 pass, Sevati “Sev” Dumas from the BLOPS campaign, looks insane.
Not “buy this $10 battle pass”, but I’d consider dropping a few bucks on a special gear that makes everyone else look like one of the stock skins for Black Ops 6. Now that’s innovation.
