Welcome to the club, I guess.
While 2018’s Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 was always-online, it also didn’t have a singleplayer campaign (you could play against bots, but you still needed to be connected to the internet). The 2019 remake of Modern Warfare was the first CoD to be always-online on PC while also having a full singleplayer mode, and it’s been that way ever since. Over in Console Land, the singleplayer stuff remained accessible without a constant internet connection, though without your skins and so on. That’s not the case for Call of Duty: Black Ops 6, which will be always-online for everybody.
As the CoD blog explains, “To deliver the highest-quality visuals while also reducing the game’s overall storage space on your hard drive, Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 will use texture streaming across all game modes. This means you’ll need a continuous internet connection to play any game mode, including Campaign. If you’re on a console, Campaign can be played without a premium subscription service such as Game Pass Core or PlayStation Plus.”
We’re used to the phrase “texture streaming” referring to games streaming high-res textures into memory from your SSD as you’re playing, rather than what Activision are saying here—streaming from the cloud to keep the install size down. The Call of Duty games have become real storage hogs in recent years, with Modern Warfare 3 demanding up to 213GB, as if we don’t play other games and have, like, a few gig of holiday photos and legally acquired film and television libraries.
According to the system requirements, we’ll need a mere 149GB free to install Black Ops 6, or 78 GB “if COD HQ and Warzone are already installed”. Pity our poor console brothers and sisters, who will apparently need 300GB free to install Black Ops 6 and all its trimmings, though that will apparently be reduced once it’s launched.
The selling feature of Black Ops 6 is “omnimovement,” a buzzword that means “being able to sprint and dive backward and sideways instead of just forwards”. I’m sure we’ll hear more about that when the Call of Duty: Next showcase on August 26 fills us in with more info on the multiplayer side of things. Black Ops 6 is set to launch on October 25.
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