Take a poll of Call of Duty players' biggest complaints about the new game every year and you'll hear a whole lot about spawns. Spawn points are the sort of feature that you only really notice when something is wrong, and something is very wrong with them in Black Ops 6.
I've played around four hours of multiplayer since last night's launch and have kept a mental tally of Questionable Spawn Moments that are slowly chipping away at my will to live. So far I have:
- Spawned about 7ft from where I just died, then gotten killed again (2-3 times)
- Spawned in direct line-of-sight of the guy who just killed me (3-5 times)
- Spawned at the same exact respawn point (7-10 times)
- Spawned and died within the same second to a spawn-camping sniper (1 time)
Seriously, what is going on here? Where a shooter chooses to place your new body is a surprisingly complex math problem in a game as hectic as CoD. Even if Activision does have data from *looks at scratches on wall* 20 past Calls of Duty to pull from, a fresh batch of maps every year is bound to come with its own growing pains. But it's not usually this bad.
It's impossible to be certain about what's up with Black Ops 6 spawns after less than a day, but a noticeable lack of spawn variety on some maps does stand out. Not since Black Ops Cold War, Treyarch's last turn at the helm of CoD, have spawns felt so tethered to one extreme side of the map or the other, which makes it easier to predict where the easy targets are hanging out.
Spawn sides are also not switching as often as they did in either previous Modern Warfare, which might be why it's so common to get caught in a spawn trap with enemies waiting for fresh meat to appear every few seconds. On one map in particular, Vorkuta, my team was stuck spawning from the same side, despite enemies lurking nearby, for two-thirds of the match.
Clearly Treyarch has some kinks to work out. Black Ops 6 is out today everywhere (no early campaign access for this one). I'm hearing decent things about the campaign and the return of round-based Zombies, and regular old multiplayer is pretty OK so far. If you're not sure if you're coming aboard for another 12 months of CoD, the cheapest way to play it is a $12 subscription to PC Game Pass.
