Arachnophobia is an unfortunate burden to bear when spiders happen to be one of the standard stock enemy types that game designers reach for when they need to fill a cave or spooky ruin, even if we all might be getting a bit tired of dealing with the associated poisons, webs, and spiderling-stuffed egg clutches. Thankfully, it's only getting more common for developers to address spider concerns—whether with arachnophobia modes, or simply deciding to skip spiders entirely—and Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 is following suit.
I wouldn't be surprised, however, if the nightmarish results of Black Ops 6's arachnophobia mode end up feeding into entirely different sets of phobias.
Detailed in an Activision blog post outlining Black Ops 6's accessibility features, the optional arachnophobia mode targets spider enemies in the latest iteration of Zombies, and its changes are pretty specific in scope: It goes for the legs. The legginess of spiders—both the number of legs itself, and the ratio of leg-to-body size—tends to be a trigger for arachnophobia sufferers, so Black Ops 6's arachnophobia mode just, well, turns them off. It yoinks them. Set legs to no.
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"This setting will allow players to change the appearance of spider-like enemies in Zombies without affecting their game play," the blog post says, and that's not inaccurate. But the results, frankly, are awful.
I haven't dabbled in Zombies since the distant past of Black Ops 2, but I'm told that spiders in following Zombies entries were pretty traditional arachnids—big black widows, essentially. The spiders in Black Ops 6 Zombies, however, are eyeless, fleshy things with grinning, toothy maws. When their legs are toggled off by the arachnophobia mode, we're left with a hovering, tumorous, flesh-tone leech. It sucks, man.
Still, even if it's more horrible for the rest of us, it's an improvement for arachnophobes. Think of it this way: Even if you're not an arachnophobe, you just gained an option to inject some extra horror into your zombie experience. Everybody wins.
