The campaign ofCall of Duty: Black Ops 6is just what the franchise needed, with the game’s story steadying the ship after the controversy ofModern Warfare 3’s short and underwhelming single-player experience. The title’s story pushes the franchise’s themes of espionage and explosive world-altering action to another level, and this is largely reflected in the gameplay of the campaign as well as the quality of the narrative itself.
A lot of the early praise ofCall of Duty: Black Ops 6’s campaign comes from the massive variety that exists in each of its missions, with avenues of combat and exploration being drastically different between experiences. One mission, in particular, stands out above the rest due to its premise and scale, with Hunting Season featuring an open world jam-packed with optional and mainline objectives for players to discover and tackle. The feel and freedom of Hunting Season is reminiscent of the best single-player experiences that theBattlefieldfranchise has produced in the past, with theBlack Ops 6mission being a real statement fromCoDtowards its largest industry rival.
Call of Duty: Black Ops 6’s Hunting Season Demands a Rebuttal From the Battlefield Franchise
TheHunting Season mission is the fourth inCall of Duty: Black Ops 6’s globetrotting campaign, with the premise of the mission seeing the game’s rogue group of operatives head to Iraq to aid an elite SAS group. Away from the more linear and stealth-based missions that come before it, Hunting Season sends players off into an impressively large open map in search of three Scud missile launchers.
Aside from these three primary objective missile sites, there are 19 optional points of interest for the player to explore and clear out in Hunting Season, making it an impressively expansive experience for players wanting to encounter everything it has to offer. With the help of a vehicle to traverse the sprawling map, players can tackle each of these objectives at their own pace and in any order, offering a level of freedom that is not usually associated with thecampaign formula of theCall of Dutyfranchise.
CoDhas been trying to break from its traditional linear storytelling for some time now, with the recentModern Warfare 3featuring open Combat Missions in its own campaign, but Hunting Season seems to have finally gotten this concept right for the franchise. Of course, more open experiences are much more synonymous with theBattlefieldfranchise, which has been the largest direct FPS competitor toCall of Dutyfor quite some time.
Black Ops 6 Might Encourage the Next Battlefield to Go Back to its Roots
Battlefieldhas had its own campaign-based controversies in recent years, withBattlefield 2042infamously deciding not to feature a single-playerwhatsoever, and with past releases instead opting for more linear individual missions. This is a far cry from the massive open missions of the likes ofBattlefield: Bad Company 2, and it seems thatCoDhas smartly capitalized on this aspect ofBattlefieldwithinBlack Ops 6.
Not only do the more traditional linear levels ofBlack Ops 6meet the standards of what is expected from a solidCoDrelease, but Hunting Season crucially shows that the franchise is capable of producing exciting missions at the opposite end of the spectrum. Amid the constantcompetition betweenCall of DutyandBattlefield, and the projects that both franchises are expected to release in 2025, the success of Hunting Season puts quite a bit of pressure on the nextBattlefieldto finally hark back to its successful past with open missions.
