Call Of Duty: Black Ops 6 Will Require A 'Continuous' Internet Connection (Yes, Even Campaign)

The call of duty app is kind of insane. They should think about doing something else with that.

Haha what BS. Alan Wake 2, Avatar, Horizon FW, Hellblade 2 and many more don't need to stream textures to look as good as they do or need to take up 100's and 100's of gigs. This is just BS so they can justify the always online thing.

No thanks. Let me download everything and play it.

Was already skipping it because they skipped 4 player split screen zombies. But this isn't doing it any favors.

Well I was interested in the campaign as I said in the live stream, but for how big the download is, plus all the other stuff it comes with I probably won’t bother for what is usually 4-6hours.

Surely, for a game that relies on a steady frame rate/minimal latency, requiring it to stream assets from the Internet is something you'd want to avoid. Leaving your game play experience at the mercy of folks connection speeds and service providers feels like a recipe for disaster.

I wouldnt be surprised if they announce this as optional and you can install the lot if you want. Then the question of storage size in the series s may come into play.

Play the campaign via gamepass then dump the game. It's worthless to me otherwise.

This seems like a really good way to de-value your games.

I'm sure we will all survive this terrible fate that has befallen us...

I'm good, thanks. They think the game is disposable, so I'll take their word for it. Cause my income is not.

We built consoles with extremely fast SSDs so we could stream texture data from the internet. What?

Jeez 300gb, its going to be very annoying for the people that have the original series s and no other storage devices.

This should be optional; like stay connected and enable texture streaming and it loads ahead of you as you go… or disconnect and the game still looks great; just not as good. 🤷‍♂️

@EdgarTheBug - I think the 300GB thing is a bit misleading. That’s for the entire app and MWII and MWIII as well as Black Ops 6. I think the Series version of BO6 is about 85GB and the cross-gen bundle c120GB (so hopefully not quite as ridiculous as some are making out).

I’m not bothered about the always online thing for this title - I’ll play through the campaign once or twice on Gamepass and then uninstall anyway.

“Stream textures” yeah right, I was actually going to get cod this year but you can forget it now

@Feffster Yeah I thought that also, good shout.

If it's optional ok, but streaming textures constantly instead of downloading them once? Sounds like an awesome idea for a shooter...

This trend is basically speeding up my loss of interest in new AAA games.

I hope the return to round based zombies means a simpler zombie map. Give me more ascension type levels. I don't want some huge map with railcars or anything. Just let me turn the power on, buy juggernaut, hit the mystery box, run a horde in circles and slug it out for 30ish rounds

And despite this the install will still eat 300 gb this time around! 🙃

well, I 100% won't be buying this then, as when they eventually stop supporting it, the game will be worthless

if they want to reduce storage space, how about not forcing people to download 3 games!

@Dimey By the time they stop supporting this, the enhanced textures download patch will be 0.0005% of the 2040's console storage 😁.

@Banjo- you're probably right, but I just don't like the idea of buying something that needs always online, feels like a rental!

but it's on GP, so I'll still get to play it

@Dimey What I mean is you'll be able to download the textures and play offline. I'm sure.

Guess what's going to happen when the next xbox comes out and requires a constant connection all the time because it'll be using the cloud.

@Dimey Gamepass is just renting games. Also dony buy the new top spin. Seen something about it becoming unplayable in Jan 2026.

@Nexozi oh I know, If I like a game I buy it, even if it's on GP

If this is the way going forward I don't ever need to buy another COD. I have over 20 COD games and this nonsense is going to loose you fans. And the reasoning for always online connection is pathetic.

This makes no sense. If you have a 100 Mb/s internet connection (which many people don't), that works out to just 12 MB/s, which is slower than an Xbox 360's DVD drive. For an idea of what internet-based texture streaming would typically be capable of, just look at RAGE's megatextures when run directly off the DVD (it's not ideal).

Even a regular 7200 RPM hard drive can load data at upwards of a gigabit per second, which is faster than pretty much anyone's internet connection.

@smoreon They aren't running the entire game through the internet lol! Look at how XCloud works and try again. This is more likely just a texture overlay while all the grunt work is done locally. There is a LOT of lacking in understanding of what this is going around... But needless freakout sessions is the norm these days. People just want to be mad about something.

Renders any handheld playing much less desirable. Need to stick by a modem.

There are much bigger, also great looking games out there that don't take up this insane amount of storage. I previously believed that the developers simply weren't talented enough to do otherwise but it must be a cynical publisher decision? Why?

@Trmn8r Oh, I get that. But even streaming (some of) the textures would take a crazy amount of bandwidth, well beyond what a typical internet connection can handle. Consider how many games already struggle to load their textures off an HDD with gigabit+ transfer speeds!

If the textures are so big that disk space (and streaming speed) is an issue, then anything the internet can do is just a drop in the bucket.

This whole thing just seems strange, like an excuse to be always-online... or if nothing else, it's a solution in search of a problem.

@smoreon Again, look into how XCloud works. It could be a lot more than just a drop in the bucket if you understand that. You are focusing on the transfer speed of the internet alone and not the processing power of the hosted server that is sending it. Cloud based computing is coming to the mainstream. I don't mind it as long as it improves the game. We will find out on this hybrid form this fall.

@Trmn8r I'm not sure I follow. You're talking about game streaming, right? XCloud just has to send a half-decent video feed. Streaming a video is very different from, and much less intensive than, sending high-resolution assets to the player's console. Or does XCloud also have more specialized capabilities that I haven't heard about?

I get that the cloud can do all kinds of intensive processing, pre-calculating physics and visual effects (or running entire games remotely), but ultimately, that stuff all has to get sent to the console in a compact form after it's rendered, and that bottleneck prevents most of the really game-changing proposals from being as grand as they're supposed to be.

Are you picturing the environment textures essentially being replaced by a giant FMV (which is itself pulling from a high-fidelity rendered environment on the server)?

@smoreon Consider it making zero sense due to not understanding the technology and wait to see what it is this fall. Or download Warzone Mobile and see for yourself (it has this technology implemented already).