Key Takeaways
- An observant player found a 2018 Ford Transit van in the 1991 setting of the Black Ops 6 campaign.
- The perceived inaccuracy sparked discussion among players and raised concerns about asset reuse in games.
- While the issue may be minor to most players, it highlights the balancing act of using high-quality assets in games.
An observant player has spotted an easy-to-miss historical inaccuracy in Call of Duty: Black Ops 6. The anachronism in the single-player story campaign sparked discussion of other potential inaccuracies in other parts of Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 and throughout the series.
The Call of Duty: Black Ops franchise has long been the home of Call of Duty‘s more inventive storytelling gambits. This is thanks to the “black ops” premise, which heavily emphasizes the idea of secret histories and conspiracy theories behind otherwise well-known historical events and figures. The original game dug deep into cold war-era espionage missions, while other entries embraced branching narratives and choice-based consequences. The latest entry in the series appears to be keeping with the tradition, with the Black Ops 6 campaign praised by celebrities like Ice T and in reviews.
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Praise isn’t perfection, though, and one detail-oriented Black Ops 6 player highlighted a funny historical inaccuracy they noticed in the campaign. Reddit user critlvcritlvcritlv shared a screenshot of what they said was a Ford Transit van seen in the campaign with the Black Ops 6 community. The problem was that the vehicle’s design appears reminiscent of the 2018 Ford Transit, while the mission itself takes place in 1991, nearly 27 years earlier.
Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 Player Finds Time-Traveling Van in the Campaign
The screenshot was taken from the Black Ops 6 campaign mission “Blood Feud,” which involves the characters Case and Sev investigating a lead in Avalon on the Medditerranean Coast in 1991. Sev meets Case in a large, disguised spy van, and it’s this van that appears to be anachronistic. In addition to its resemblance to a much more modern Ford van, the van appears to include high-intensity headlights. Such headlights (also known as xenon headlights) were not common until the late 1990s, and would thus be unlikely to feature on a van intended to look inconspicuous.
Fellow Black Ops 6 players joked about the admittedly minor anachronism, claiming that Black Ops 6 was now “literally unplayable,” and acknowledged that the vast majority of players are unlikely to notice or care. Some theorized that the van model is a stock asset reused from a different modern Call of Duty game, like the Modern Warfare 3 campaign, which is set in the 2020s. Other players disputed the assertion that the van in the screenshot is a Ford Transit, suggesting instead that it’s a Fiat Ducato, though even in that case, the design would still be ahead of its time compared to 1991.
Minor, if noticeable, issues like asset reuse highlight the ongoing debate around the practice in games. Reusing high-quality assets is a valuable cost-saving measure for game developers, but excessive reuse can leave players thinking that a game looks “cheap” or “lazy.” Some series get around the issue, like when, like when Like A Dragon games reuse assets elegantly, taking advantage of familiar sights to give players a sense of familiarity.
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