It’s Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 launch day and just before everyone jumps into the game, Activision released some pretty hefty patch notes full of small tweaks and some more substantial changes.
“We shared some key areas the team has been focused on between our Beta and the launch of the game,” Activision says. “Today, we’ve got some new details to share as well as a recap of everything you can expect when you jump in this week.”
There will be 33 weapons at launch that players can unlock and customise, and while Activision has been balancing many of these throughout the beta period, there’s still a little more reworking to be done. Changes include improved pistol and dedicated melee swap speeds, a small increase to weapon butt melee attack speeds, some adjustments to sway, bob, and overall weapon motion, and improved depth of field across all the weapons. But the most substantial change that weapons are receiving is an update to aim assist.
“In the Multiplayer beta, we tested a change that disabled aim assist at close ranges,” Activision says. “While this was a change in the right direction, we felt that this was a bit jarring when crossing that close-range threshold, so we’ve adjusted our approach to linearly interpolate aim assist strength. This means that aim assist will be much weaker at point-blank ranges and smoothly increase in strength out to a short range. We will, of course, continue to monitor and assess data and player feedback.”
Most players agree that this change is for the best: “Good change,” one player says. “I kinda like that it’s weaker up close. Having it completely off didn’t feel right, as they said. Even as a controller player vs controller. It will be a bit more skill-based in those close-range fights now.”
But obviously, having any kind of aim assist in Call of Duty, no matter how strong or weak it is, can still be controversial for some players who’d rather not have any or think it’s become worse over the years. “I’d generally like less aim assist overall as a console player,” another player says. “It just feels so easy to aim in CoD nowadays compared to old ones, but maybe that’s placebo.”
Although this question was actually answered a couple of years ago. YouTuber TheXclusiveAce made a video about whether aim assist has gotten stronger in Call of Duty over the years and found that although it may feel like it has, in reality, it hasn’t.
“While the aim assist ranges have 100% objectively increased massively within the launch of Modern Warfare 2 (2019), and that has carried over to some degree to Cold War as well as Vanguard,” TheXclusiveAce says. “When we look at the actual strength of the aim assist at 10 metres in these games, there really doesn’t appear to be any massive change whatsoever when it comes to the slowdown or the rotational aim assist. The one outlier being Infinite Warfare when it comes to rotational aim assist, and it was actually weaker in that game.”
So it’s very unlikely that Activision will go overboard and beef up aim assist no matter how many times it gets tweaked. I’m more worried about having to deal with becoming a human meat shield or hunting down someone who’s managed to perfect the chaos that is omnimovement.
