Liberty Falls Gameplay Concerns

Posted: 29 Aug 2024

A lot of footage from Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 released yesterday, including our first proper look at zombies in the form of the smaller Liberty Falls map. I’ve been looking forward to Black Ops 6, especially since it’s the longest time between Black Ops games, but seeing the footage I do have some concerns that I hope will end up not being too detrimental.

I’ve split this post up into gameplay and visual critiques, because honestly a lot of the initial criticisms were on the general aesthetics of the map. While good art direction can really elevate how it feels to play a game, even a game with bad visuals can still be fun to play.

The Gameplay

To begin on a positive note, I’m so happy that they’ve removed the menus for Pack-a-Punch and armour. They were and continue to be so buggy to navigate with a keyboard and mouse that if your armour breaks and there’s a horde of zombies chasing you then you’re safer just running past it instead of trying to stop and purchase more armour.

What caught my eye immediately was just how hard it is for you to actually go down in the early rounds. You start with 150 health and armour already applied. A zombie attack deals 17 damage. You will have to take 9 (NINE) hits to go down. There will be absolutely zero pressure at the beginning of the game. I’m the kind of classic player that loved the original two-hit down, but I think almost everyone would agree that starting with armour already equipped is unnecessary.

Both the choice of starting weapon and ammo boxes make their return, once again making your second weapon slot, wall buys, and the mystery box pointless.

Der Wunderfizz returns with two “out of stock” buttons, and the menu has room for at least 8 more perks to be added post-launch. I don’t like knowing that they could be holding several already finished perks in reserve just to have them be “new content” later on. If the post-launch perks are returning perks and not brand new additions to the series, I will be very disappointed with this decision.

Two maps on launch is good and it honestly should have been the default for Cold War, which was the first game to launch with only a single map since World at War in 2008. I appreciate its small size, especially with how much they’re talking up the scale of Terminus. It makes for a nice gameplay dynamic, where Kino Der Toten was the “main” map while Five was the bonus, slightly more claustrophic and difficult map. TranZit and Nuketown are probably the most similar to the Black Ops 6 launch, where the first map is large scale and the second one is much simpler and easy to learn. That being said, Liberty Falls has a lot of open space. I’m quite worried that it will be a very easy map, especially with the new omni-movement.

I’ve been concerned since its announcement about how omni-movement will affect the difficulty in zombies. Movement was a valuable currency in the earlier games, which has been lost over time. Up to Black Ops 2, you had to choose between sprinting fast or reloading your weapon. Being able to reload while sprinting made the gameplay easier, while also making things like Speed Cola and fast mag attachments less important. Now you’ll also be able to sprint backwards. On paper, it sounds like it can make kiting zombies incredibly trivial and make the gameplay even easier than it already has become.

The Visuals

Again, I’ll start this with a compliment: the weapon models look really good. I’ve always enjoyed looking at the weapons I’m holding; seeing how the light shines across the different materials and casts different shadows, watching all of the parts move when running, shooting, and reloading, and imagine how it would feel to actually touch it. Ignoring all of the outlandishly silly (but fun) weapon blueprints, I have no complaints here.

However, the map itself feels incredibly uninspired. This isn’t a run down and boarded up theatre. This isn’t a completely war torn Russian city. This isn’t a creepy town shrouded in darkness. It’s a town with surprisingly little debris in the middle of the day. All of the heavy lifting for the setting is done by the crashed cars; if they were removed then you could clean up most of the map with a litter picker and a hose. Daylight can and has worked in zombies before. Kino Der Toten has an excellent juxtaposition of the dark and ruined theatre and the small well-lit alleyway outside that reminds you that you are trapped in such a small and dangerous place. Gorod Krovi is almost entirely outside during the day, but the city has been utterly demolished and dark clouds surround you. Liberty Falls, to its detriment, has none of that. I think zombies looks its best when it’s dark, destroyed, overgrown, and creepy.

The doors are visually uninteresting. I think they’re intentionally laser beams because the town is on lockdown, but their clean look doesn’t help the map’s lack of destruction. I think the classic debris piles would have benefited the map more.

The church in the dark aether is of course the most interesting part of the map. I love that you go through a “portal” seamlessly to enter. It’s a shame that the rest of the map lets it down. I’ll throw in that I also hate the garish Pack-a-Punch camo, but I haven’t really been fond of them since Black Ops 2.

Finally, while it’s rather simple, I can’t complain about the HUD that much. It will have an incredible amount of customisation - you can expect me to be turning off the compass, mini-map, health bars, and damage numbers immediately - and is thankfully very unintrusive. Zombies has had a habit since Black Ops 3 of having an unnecessarily large HUD, and I’ll gladly take a more boring looking HUD over one that takes up more space than it should.

Conclusion

Black Ops 6’s Liberty Falls gameplay looks a bit dull but promising. I think Terminus will be much more popular, not just for its gameplay but also for its visual design. Hopefully my concerns end up being unfounded or minor, and Black Ops 6 ends up being another fun entry into the series. You can expect me to stream it on launch over on my Twitch channel, first doing public matches and then moving on to solo high round attempts.