Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 has a really great campaign. The missions are original, the level design is creative, and Treyarch and Raven take plenty of big swings. I was even invested in the story, which takes a fascinating turn into psychological horror at the midpoint and, then, again, in the final level. It’s the first COD campaign I remember playing that feels like a full meal on its own.
Call Of Duty Stories Slide Right Out Of My Brain
It’s so good, in fact, that it has me wishing I remembered literally anything about the stories from the past Black Ops games. This is not a case where I just haven’t played any of the games. I’m having that experience with Dragon Age: The Veilguard right now, and have determined to pay attention to the stuff I can understand and ignore the rest. But I’ve played a decent amount of the Black Ops series over the years. I completed Cold War’s campaign, put a ton of time into Black Ops 4, and played through the original’s story, too.
I played some of 2 and 3, but I don’t know for sure if I beat them. When I started writing this, I was 100 percent sure I had finished those campaigns. But I went back and checked my records, and if I did, I didn’t mark it down in my Notes app like I usually do. The fact that I can’t even remember is indicative of a problem in how COD tells its stories. If you asked me what happened in Uncharted 3, I could reel off a bunch of the beats. That’s the one where Nate thinks that Sully died, but it turns out it was just a hallucination. There’s that sick set piece where the cargo ship capsizes and then you’re doing shootouts on the roof, which is now the floor. There’s that desert level where Nate is wandering around looking like if Lawrence of Arabia was an Old Navy model.
I haven’t played Uncharted 3 since it launched 13 years ago, but Naughty Dog’s storytelling sticks in your mind because it uses the same tools cinema has been using to tell stories for over a century. You can fairly criticize Naughty Dog for relying too heavily on that bag of tricks, slavishly sticking to standard filmmaking techniques like shot-reverse shots and standard cutscenes. Could it use more of the tools video games’ interactivity puts at its disposal? Sure. But you can’t deny it knows how to use those techniques well.
I Recognize These Guys From Somewhere
Uncharted 3 might not be experimental, but its characters and set pieces are memorable because of its reliance on tried-and-true techniques. Call of Duty, on the other hand, has always told stories like it wants you to forget — or never learn to begin with — who key characters are and what they’re trying to accomplish. Hardcore fans rejoice when dudes named Soap and Captain Price return, but who is going to remember exposition communicated via voice-over while newspaper clippings, redacted CIA documents, and black-and-white photos of George Bush flash by? This is not a storytelling technique you would learn in any film school or game design class because it is anti-memorable.
This isn’t the case for Call of Duty: Black Ops 6, but it has to overcome the hurdle of bringing back characters that I, and many casual players, just won’t remember anything about. I wish it had a recap to get me up to speed on who these guys are. I only remember Adler’s face because I’ve always thought he looked like Robert Redford. And Woods rings a bell, but I couldn’t actually tell you anything about him.
Or, at least, I couldn’t before Black Ops 6. This time around, though, Treyarch and Raven use storytelling best practices. The game has a few of those microfiche cutscenes, but most of its story is told in more effective ways. There are well-lit cutscenes, memorable conversations with your squad, in-level beats that are communicated through interesting gameplay. Usually saying that a game’s story is “good for a video game” is a back-handed compliment. With Black Ops 6, Call of Duty finally learns how to tell a story like any other video game, and gets good in the process.
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Black Ops 6 Is Proof That Bigger Isn’t Always Better
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