Every new Call of Duty has a disproportionately powerful gun or perk for its first few weeks, but I can’t recall one of these games launching with an idea as bad as the Recon combat speciality perk. Combat specialties are one of Black Ops 6’s neater additions this year—a sort of “set bonus” perk that you only get when you equip three lower perks of the same color (green, blue, or red).
I’d classify two out of three of these special perks as “nice to have” bonuses. Strategist (green) gives you more points for playing objectives and Enforcer (red) regenerates health faster after kills. Recon, however, gives you one of the most powerful advantages you can possibly have in Call of Duty. As its description goes:
“Enemies can be seen through walls for a short time after respawn; a HUD edge indicator flashes when an enemy is outside your view; leave no death skulls when killing enemies.”
You get wallhacks! Legal, Activision-approved wallhacks, and not just once in a while. Every single time you spawn, you get a snapshot of where the entire enemy team is and isn’t. Not just with pings on a map either: you see their entire silhouettes in red on your screen and it updates for a second or two as they move. It takes a little bit of time to unlock Recon, so I didn’t have much exposure to the perk during the Black Ops 6 beta, but now that I’ve had a week with the full game, can we agree it’s pretty busted?
Were this perk in an FPS with bigger maps or maybe longer times-to-kill, brief x-ray vision might not be a big deal. But on Black Ops 6’s tiny maps, you can do a lot of damage with that info—exemplified perfectly by this frankly horseshit kill someone got on Derelict (shared by user BigJed7 on Reddit).
Who thought this perk was ever a good idea? from r/blackops6
If that happened to me, Black Ops 6 would probably no longer be on my SSD. More clips of folks exploiting the almighty power of the official wallhack perk are appearing online, and everytime I watch one I’m just baffled that Recon made it into the game as-is. People are literally respawning, aiming at the head of someone they can see through a wall from their spawn point, and getting a completely unfair kill. Once you watch a killcam where someone only found you because of Recon, you can’t unsee it.
Curse you! (Image credit: Activision Blizzard)
Good Call of Duty play is as much about picking up on audio and visual cues as any competitive FPS, so you can imagine how Recon throws a wrench into its already murky balance. Stealth exists at a premium in this series—simply shooting a gun is enough to reveal your location on the mini-map, and that’s assuming you’re not already getting snitched on by a UAV plane in the air. Taking back a bit of privacy on the battlefield usually requires eating up valuable attachment or perk slots with suppressors or Cold Blooded, but for some reason, Recon simply has no counter.
So when, at any given time, multiple people on the other team get to know exactly where I am for free, what use is Ghost? Why do UAVs even exist? Why wouldn’t everybody just equip the perk that literally gets you free kills at best and valuable information at worst?
Come on Treyarch, we’ve had our fun cosplaying as hackers. Please nerf this terrible idea into the ground and let’s pretend it never happened.
