Get to Know the Basics of the Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 Multiplayer

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Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 launched over the weekend and has come out to rave reviews and positivity from the community, as well as bumper numbers. It seems like a return to form for the franchise, and with the addition of Black Ops 6 to Game Pass, it seems more people than ever might be jumping in, either for the first time, or as lapsed CoD fans from days gone by.

Well, whatever type of Call of Duty player you are, we’re here to give you the lowdown on the the multiplayer (MP). Read on for more information and get to know the basics before heading out to war.

https://youtu.be/GYG_h-L-K2E

Boot Camp

I highly recommend you head to the “Training Course” before you jump into the MP (select Multiplayer > Lobby > Training Course). It’s fairly quick, gives you a heads up about the controls, including the brand new “omnimovement” mechanics, AND you get a tasty achievement / trophy for your troubles.

Don’t worry about the diving stuff. I haven’t used it yet and I’ve managed to get to Level 50 so far.

The Setup

Be sure to familiarise yourself with your loadout first off. Might seem obvious, but you want to to know what you have access to and how it helps you. The first four levels you get access to pre-assembled loadouts to get you going. Once you reach Level 4, from shear awesomeness, you can build your own loadouts of destruction.

Weapon – you start with a ‘primary weapon’ and a secondary weapon, a sidearm, like a pistol. You can choose which primary weapon you prefer from the different class types like assault rifle, sub-machine gun (SMG), shotgun, marksman rifles etc. My preference to get going is an assault rifle, the XM4, the default one, is a great strong first gun to get you going. You’ll know yourself what guns you like to play with, and if you don’t mix it up.
Attachments – when you first start building your loadout, you’ll have zero extras on your gun. By getting kills with your equipped weapon, you’ll increase its Weapon Level, which grants you access to wide range different attachments of your gun. You’re starting with a stripped back gun so don’t expect to be going hell to leather straight from the off. These different attachments affect the guns performance with regards to firepower (damage your gun can do), accuracy, mobility (and quickly you can move), and handling (aiming down sight, reloading). Be sure to experiment with different attachments to see what fits your play style. No attachment makes you a god, and firepower can be misleading, it doesn’t make your gun more powerful overall, it’s usually attachments for certain scenarios (like how much damage you do through the environment, or the rate of fire of your weapon). As a standard you can only equip five of the nine types of attachments at once.
Optics – if you equip an optical sight to your weapon, you can unlock a range of different reticles to change the original one that might help you with accuracy and targeting. You unlock these different reticles by getting kills with that optic equipped!

Throwables / consumables – you get a ‘lethal’ and ‘non-lethal’ item to use. Lethal are your grenades, Molotov cocktails and the like, and your non-lethal come as stun grenades, flashbangs, stimshots (restore your health quicker) etc. You unlock more of these as your increase your player level (getting kills and scoring from objectives and challenges).
Melee weapon – you can do serious damage up close and personal with your melee weapon. You need to press and hold the melee button to equip it (it’s different to a melee hit with the butt of your gun)
Field Upgrades – these are special equipment that charge up over time in game that you can use in a range of different ways. You can get access to ammo packs, mines to lay on the field, and even the ability to join the other team as a ‘sleeper agent’ to take them out from within!
Perks – as you level up you will unlock different perks, these give you passive boosts in the game such as quieter movement, reduced explosive damage, and scavenging ammo from fallen enemies.
Wildcard – these are fairly powerful boosts to your loadout, such as equipping more than the maximum number of attachments on your primary weapon, or equipping two primary weapons (big fan!).
Scorestreaks – next to your loadout option is the scorestreak menu. Scorestreaks are boosts in-game that you can activate by successfully getting to the items score threshold in one life. The more powerful ones cost more and are harder to obtain. There’s great variety from UAV (ping enemies on your minimap for you and your teammates), a helicopter gunship that comes in and shoots at enemies, to the hard-to-get but game-ending nuke!

You’re Getting Grinder on my Grinder Over Here!

You’ve probably seen all of those shiny, colourful, and quite frankly extravagant (and no good in a military situation) skins on the weapons in Call of Duty, and you’re probably thinking, how do I get me some of that bling (people still say bling right?).

Well good news, you can unlock a whole raft of fanciful skins for your weapons by just playing the game. Though you’ll have to start busting skulls, because you’ll be required to get headshots to unlock a lot of them.

And if you want those ‘mastery’ skins or even the glowy animated ones, you’ll need to put the work in. Skins for many of the weapons require you to get a certain number of unlocks across multiple weapons to progress, as well as completing some extra challenges (such as three kills without dying on 10 different occasions).

Modus Operandi

There are eleven ‘core’ game modes and seven ‘hardcore’ game modes. Core are your standard game modes, where Hardcore modes are lower health (quite often die in one hit) as well scorestreak restrictions.

Knowing the game modes can help you out, so you’re not taken by surprise when you’ve no idea what’s going on in those first few rounds (not speaking from experience of anything).

The main game modes are:

Team Deathmatch – what you’d expect, your in teams, murder the opposing enemies.
Kill Order – random team member will be designated as the High-Value Target (HVT). The player who is the HVT gets a scout pulse and armor and plates (armor that you can use if you take some hits to boost your armor) and can be downed (meaning you can be revived by a team mate). Killing the HVT gets you more points.
Domination – three capture points on the map (A, B, and C). Stand in the designated to capture the point to earn score for your team. You don’t need to stay in the space once it’s captured but your enemies will be trying to capture those points.
Hardpoint – one location appears on the map, teammates must be in the ‘hardpoint’ to earn points. The hardpoint is on a timer and moves around the map. There are set locations it appears in.
Search and Destroy – two teams, one team is trying to plant a bomb at a designated location, and the other team is trying to stop them, or defuse the bomb. If the bomb planting team plants the bomb, the other team have a limited time window to defuse the bomb. If they defuse the bomb they win the round, if the bomb explodes, the other team wins the round. Both teams can win be eliminating the opposing team, you only have one life per round.

Control – take turns attacking and defending capture zones. The zones have three stages of capture. Once a third is captured it is locked in, if a section isn’t completely captured, progress can be reversed by the defending team. You only have a limited time as attackers to succeed, but completely capturing a point extends your time. Both teams have a limited number of shared lives to play with.
Headquarters – a location appears on the map which must be captured. Once captured, your headquarters are established and you start scoring points. The team that successfully establishes the headquarters are not able to respawn until the opposing team disables the headquarters (that means you have only life per team member to defend your headquarter whilst it is active). The location of the headquarters moves around the map.
Kill Confirmed – works like a standard Team Deathmatch, except that whenever a player is killed, they drop a floating dog tag. You must collect the enemies dog tags to score for your team. If you or a teammate dies, you can ‘deny a kill’ by collecting yours or your teammates dog tags before the enemies.
Free-For-All – Team Deathmatch with no team, you’re on your own. The player with the highest score wins!
Gunfight – you get one life and predetermined random loadouts, can you play the cards you’re dealt? The game is two teams of two.
Face-Off modes – there are ‘face-off’ versions of Team Deathmatch, Kill Confirmed, Kill Order, and Domination, where scorestreaks are turned off.
And we recently learned that Infected mode is about to be added that sees player controller zombies trying to infect the remaining human players.

If you don’t like a particular mode, you can edit it out of your search, so you only play the modes you like.

Maps, the Way, uhuh, uhuh, I Like It

There are a whopping 16 maps in Black Ops 6, with a lot of variety. You’ll gravitate to ones you like more than others but there’s certainly a great variety to get to grips with. It’s worth trying different routes, flanks, and looking for secrets and details that might give you the edge.

There are two types of maps, regular maps and strike maps. Strike maps are smaller maps, designed for smaller game types and intense battles.

This can only come from repeated play, but being familiar with your map is super helpful. Not just from a navigation perspective (i.e. how to get around places) but some of the nuances in the maps, here’s some examples (the map name is in bold):

Skyline has an underground ‘panic room’ that you can access behind a secret bookshelf on one side and by an elevator shaft on the other.
There are several vertical ziplines in Protocol to help you get to the top floor of the two buildings on each side of the map.
The hangar in Subsonic has two doors that seemingly open on a timer, but there are switches that you can use to control them (great in objective defense modes to funnel your enemies).

Think about your playstyle, the weapons equipped and your surroundings. Have you got a big corridor in front of you that a sniper could be sat the end of, with you no having no hope of pinging them with your close-range SMG?

HUDs Up!

There’s a lot of helpful information on your screen during a match that it’s worth paying attention to.

Location and compass – you might not realise, but wherever you are in the map has a name. You can use this to tell your teammates where you are. If you’re playing nearby, you might use the number above to indicate the direction of where you’re looking to help your teammates track your enemies, “enemy at 264”.
Minimap – an absolute essential HUD item. Enemies appear as red dots when they are visible (usually when they are making noise or being revealed by a UAV). You can use suppressor’s and perks to reduce your presence on the minimap so enemies can’t find you.
Scores – keep an eye on the scores to see how you’re faring in the match.
Objective – usually visible wherever you are (as long as you’re looking at it), it’ll indicate where you need to head and the current status of it (under threat, captured, or contested).
Scorestreaks – the highest cost scorestreak is at the top, the cheapest at the bottom. A number under the scorestreaks indicates what score you need to get to make your next streak available.
Field upgrade – a yellow circle fills up as you play, indicating the upgrade is usable once it is full.
Lethal and non-lethal – this is where your number of equipment is indicated. Certain perks let your equipment recharge overtime, a yellow bar will appear underneath if so.
Ammo – the larger number (in size) is your current magazine, and the smaller (size) number is how much ammo you have in reserve.
Fire mode – some guns have multiple fire mode options, such as ‘full-auto’, semi-auto, and ‘single-shot’. Indicates which one you have active.
Where you’ll die – I don’t need to explain this one do I?