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Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 may have had one of the most successful launches in COD series’ history, but it hasn’t taken long for cracks to appear. Having ploughed hours into the game, I now see why. We reported on launch that BLOPS 6 multiplayer has been plagued by terrible spawns, but it’s got to a point where players ‘can’t breathe’ without being shot to pieces.
Black Ops 6 maps are your Final Destination
Be warned: heading into Free For All or Team Deathmatch results in a minefield of spawn-killing and unrelenting claustrophobia. Babylon, in particular, will often see players spawn next to someone else or in the middle of a killzone, only to be mowed down by multiple people in a matter of seconds.
Spawn camping isn’t really too much of a problem here, or at least as far as I can tell, but the randomness and merciless placement of spawn points within an already-small map causes major issues. It’s surprisingly unbalanced, even for a CoD game, and it makes every match a roulette of death that can’t be predicted.
In a recent Free For All match, I got caught in a mini death loop, where I died and then spawned next to someone, died again, spawned and then was killed seconds later. And I’m not the only one feeling this. Over on the Black Ops 6 Sub-Reddit community, it appears thousands of players are suffering with the issue.
“Do perks even matter? Does the weapon you are using make any difference? Do your nades matter? I’m starting to doubt anything at this point because no matter the loadout, the results seem to be always the same,” wrote one Reddit user.
Another wrote: “On Skyline last night, I killed a guy in his spawn, 3 of my teammates spawned on his corpse, and I turned to run up the outside stairs to immediately get killed by the guy I killed.”
The latter comment struck a chord with me. Too often you’ll kill someone, only for them to spawn close enough to you to run over and finish you off. You’ve usually not even recovered from any damage taken from your last bout seconds before; you’re a sitting duck.
Shipment 24/7
Black Ops 6 spawns are so bad within the game’s restrictive map layouts that the game almost feels like every map is a spiritual successor to Shipment, a deliberately small, highly intense map where your lifespan is a matter of seconds. It actually works quite well… and is fun, because it does exactly what it says on the tin and you go into it with an expectation to die a lot. But in standard deathmatch, you want to be able to lean on your own tactics, loadouts and playstyle more. Unfortunately, BLoPS 6 doesn’t support that.
The good news is that there will likely be, as is always the way with Call of Duty, a horde of balancing patches, both from a weapon and gameplay perspective. When such a patch will drop we do not know, but rest assured Treyarch will be monitoring community forums closely. For now, if it’s all getting too much, use the game mode filter and remove the modes you don’t want.