CoD Black Ops 6: Looping scorestreaks are gone

Streaks are going back to a more traditional route

Activision

Treyarch and Raven Software have dropped a few details on the upcoming Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 on a podcast, revealing that the looping scorestreaks from Black Ops Cold War won’t be making their return in this year’s iteration of the first-person shooter. 

As players participate in a multiplayer match of CoD, they earn points by killing enemies, taking objectives, scoring assists, and so forth. Reaching certain thresholds allows them to call on one of three special abilities or rewards of their choice, which are called scorestreaks. 

Traditionally, dying resets your current score, so you need to start from scratch in each life – but Treyarch’s previous CoD entry did away with that restriction and allowed players to continue to earn points towards their next threshold regardless of death. What’s more, after earning all three of their scorestreaks, players simply would be able to begin the loop again, starting with the lowest reward in their kit – in the past, you needed to die to get access to any streak rewards again after using them all up.

Naturally, this mechanic allows strong players to continue to dominate, not putting a halt to their momentum in any way, while still allowing weaker players to get to their scorestreaks eventually.

However, this also results in scorestreaks feeling rather spammy – and that’s exactly what the developers want to avoid in Black Ops 6, according to Treyarch’s Matt Scronce.

“We’re going back to a traditional scorestreak system,” he stated. “Score will reset on death. Right now scorestreaks do not loop. That was something we talked about quite a bit. Really, the goal there is we want to reward players in a single life fairly, [...] but we really want to avoid scorestreak spam. That’s something I personally just really don’t like. I know a lot of players don’t like it.”

While Scronce’s stance sounds pretty firm, his exact words seem to be leaving enough room for future changes, should the community demand them – after all, a “right now scorestreaks do not loop” is not the same as ‘scorestreaks do not loop, period.’

In any case, players will have the chance to try all the changes in the CoD Black Ops 6 beta, for which the dates have just recently been announced.