With thousands of players diving into the Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 beta over the weekend, we’re starting to get a taste of what the next few years of arcadey high-octane action will have in store for us. We’re seeing intense movement, slick killstreaks gallore, but most importantly a hilarious wave of voice-chat clips thanks to the game’s new human shield feature.
Almost immediately after the beta went live, short clips of players taking each other hostage and whispering sweet nothings started circulating online. This feature is a natural evolution of the live mic activation following a death in Warzone, but far more personal, difficult to pull off, and comical. Your pay off for grabbing another player is 12 seconds of uninterrupted banter.
Now, a lot of people will see this and see an opportunity for nastier stuff running amoc. It’s a fair concern! You get a few sweaty folks in a Call of Duty lobby and they’ll be saying the same heinous trash that they’ve been yelling at each other for nearly two decades now. Thankfully, as in Warzone, voice comms can be disabled. So if this isn’t for you – no harm no foul.
For the rest of us, it’s a lot of fun. Obviously the vast majority of players are using this opportunity to get saucy with scrubs they manage to get their hands on. Others are coordinating makeout sessions in the middle of firefights, and Casey Lawrence quickly went viral on Twitter by getting all romantic and singing Ray J down by the pool. You might be sensing a running theme here.
In terms of virality it’s clips of this that is propelling Black Ops 6 to the tops of people’s feeds. People appear to be loving it. The devs of Treyarch revealed this feature with a simple ask: be nice. I think they might have opened Pandora’s box with this one.
