We all knew this year’s Call of Duty would be another entry in Treyarch’s Black Ops subseries, simply titled Call of Duty: Black Ops 6. However, one interesting and exciting new addition that was kept under wraps until the recent Call of Duty Direct was omnidirectional movement. This means players will be able to sprint, slide, and dive in any direction, and the team at Treyarch not only hopes fans will like it, but that it’ll be popular enough to become a mainstay for future Call of Duty games.
On June 10, associate design director Matt Scronce and senior director of production Yale Miller answered questions from the press (including VGC) about Black Ops 6. Naturally, the topic of omnidirectional movement (or Omnimovement as they’re calling it) was brought up, and Miller admitted he hopes it will become a new standard for the Call of Duty series when asked. He added, “I think if it’s really good, it won’t just become the standard for other Call of Duty games,” suggesting other developers could pick it up for their games too.
Of course, that’s dependent on how well Omnimovement is received; something Miller is acutely aware of too: “If it’s great, people are going to want it. … So we hope we do a great job at it…” He and the rest of the team won’t need to wait too long for feedback since there will be a beta session in a few months time. There’s no exact date for it yet, but frequent Call of Duty leaker BobNetworkUK has said on Twitter it could start from August 28.
Once Black Ops 6 is in players’ hands, the team will be able to tweak Omnimovement when needed, especially since Miller is expecting particularly skilled players to figure out ways of exploiting the mechanic: “We’re going to continue to tweak as we get different skill levels, really good players. People who’ll find ways to exploit it. We want that, so that we can just continue to polish it.”
It will be interesting to see if Omnimovement proves so popular with fans that Activision will want to see it present in whatever Infinity Ward and Sledgehammer Games, the other two major CoD developers, work on next. There is precedent for this; the Zombies mode in Treyarch’s Call of Duty: World at War was such a hit that it’s not only a mainstay of the Black Ops games, but it was also included in Sledgehammer’s Call of Duty: Vanguard and Infinity Ward’s Modern Warfare 3. There’s also Prestige Mode, which was introduced in the original Modern Warfare from 2007 and would go on to appear in almost every mainline CoD game ever since (though it was ironically absent in the 2019 Modern Warfare reboot).
