Immediately following the excellent Xbox Games Showcase, Microsoft and Activision held a Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 Direct. Providing a deep-dive into the next iteration of the upcoming first-person shooter.

If you want to find out the finer details without the video then we’ve got you covered below.

Core gameplay upgrades

Omnimovement

Treyarch have created an entirely new movement system, dubbed ‘Omnimovement’. This will allow players to sprint, slide, and dive in any direction (forward, sidestepping, and backpedaling). This makes players more fluid as they navigate campaign, multiplayer, and zombies.

Intelligent movement

Intelligent movement allows players to move dynamically with the fewest button presses possible. There will be additional assist options which can be enabled (or disabled) to your preference, including sprint, mantle, and crouch assists.

Enemy hit zones

With Black Ops 6, the number of enemy ‘hit zones’ (where an enemy is hit determines how they react) have been more than doubled from four to nine. This means means there will be a wider variety of takedown animations in campaign and multiplayer. For example, if an enemy was shot in the left or right leg they’d play a specific death animation related to the shot. Or, if an Operator takes a high calibre sniper round to the right arm as they're sprinting, that appendage will snap back and spin them around as the weight of the body carries forward as they collapse to the ground.

World Connectivity

A more subtle upgrade to the game. It’s a set of ‘animation overhauls’ that are designed to keep the player immersed in the gaming world. One example they showed in the Direct was ‘corner slicing’ where your weapon will rotate in the same direction you’re going.

Graphics, visuals, and the HUD

Treyarch have described a visual style that is aiming for a mix of “real” and “hyper-real” visuals, similar to those of an action movie. The devs used a whole load of real-world references so that they make the visuals feel as real as possible.

They’ve really turned up the visuals on the Operators too, using ‘photogrammetry’, authentic gear and observing a range of subtle nuances have all helped bring the characters to life, including the dirt in a characters fingernails, and the sweat and oil in their palms.

For the Heads Up Display (HUD), you’ll be able to customise how your HUD looks, moving or taking away elements of the HUD to suit your playstyle.

Campaign

The Black Ops 6 Campaign takes players to the early 1990s. The fictional story builds on the history of the time, thrusting you into a conspiracy where a shadowy force has infiltrated the U.S. government. Anyone who resists is branded as a traitor, forcing players to go rogue for the first time to fight the very machine that created them. Nothing is what it seems, and the truth may be hard to fathom, drawing you ever deeper into intrigue, distrust, and mind-bending psychological revelations. Feels very Black Ops.

A whole host of characters from the Black Ops franchise are making their return along with some new faces too, including Frank Woods and Russell Adler.

Campaign missions will allow you to approach them in a number of ways, and an array of weapons and gadgets from the post-Cold War era will ensure you have the right tools for the job. This means you can have the choice of stealthy stealthy, or full guns blazing (NB: not every situation can be sneaky sneaky; that’s just good advice for life).

There’ll be plenty of weapons to choose from (in all modes of the game), ensuring that there’s a ‘tool for every job’.

Multiplayer

Call of Duty Black Ops 6 is looking to provide a good deal of content at launch:

• 16 brand new Multiplayer maps on Day One, including 12 Core 6v6 maps and four small-sized ‘Strike’ maps
• Strike maps are unique, stand-alone locations designed to be played in 2v2 or Face Off 6v6 matches.
• Return of Theater mode – The theater allows users to save gameplay, take screenshots and fast forward, pause, slow down, or rewind the videos. 
• Classic Prestige is back – when you hit top rank (Level 55) you ‘prestige’, resetting your unlocks and returning to Level 1 but with a set of rewards for doing so. Once you’ve reached Prestige 10, you can enter Prestige Master which gives you a massive 1000 additional levels to rank through.

Maps for multiplayer have reportedly been designed with the ‘three-lane’ map design in mind. Aiming for quick time to engagement but allowing variety in the maps to accommodate different game modes.

Zombies

As noted above, Black Ops 6 sees the return of ’round-based’ Zombies. Two new maps will launch with the game ‘Terminus’ and ‘Liberty Falls’ and it will reportedly continue the Dark Aether narrative that was started in Black Ops Cold War.

And of course, like all Zombies mode of times gone by, there’ll be a load of easter eggs, powerful weapons, and a whole heap of zombies to destroy.

This is only the beginning of information about Black Ops 6. The Worldwide Multiplayer Reveal Event will take place at the Call of Duty NEXT event on 28 August. There will also be details of a multiplayer beta coming in the near future too.

For more in-depth exploration of the announcements, you can head to the Call of Duty blog.

Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 releases on PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One and Xbox Series on 25 October. It will enter Game Pass on release day too.