The beta for Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 begins tomorrow, and it features eight different modes for players to check out. While I’m guessing most will want to play iconic modes like Team Deathmatch (TDM) or Domination, I recommend you give Kill Order a shot.
Kill Order is a mode new in Black Ops 6 that finds a way to twist the core TDM formula to make it less chaotic. I spoke to developers at Treyarch about its creation and learned that Kill Order works as well as it does because it was built around the aspects of Call of Duty that players like best.
A high-value mode
At its core, Kill Order is TDM with a twist. The basics will be familiar as two teams of six compete to get the most kills, earn points, and win a match. To help focus the action, one player on each team is named the “High Value Target.” This “HVT,” as the game and developers call it, is powered up with extra armor, directional indicators for other players on the minimap, and the ability to earn more score with each enemy kill. They’re not a juggernaut or anything, but in a one-on-one between an HVT and an enemy player, the HVT is more likely to win.
The downside is that all players can see where the HVTs on each team are, so they can play the objective and focus on killing the HVT to earn a lot of points as well. A new HVT is picked at random after one dies, so Kill Order has the cadence of a TDM match rather than the tenser pace of Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War’s VIP Escort mode. During my hands-on time with Black Ops 6’s multiplayer at Call of Duty Next in Washington, D.C., I fell in love with Kill Order.
I tend to be the kind of person who plays the objective in a shooter, and the chaos of Call of Duty TDM is often too overwhelming to be fun for me. With Kill Order, I had a goal whether I was the HVT or not. When I wasn’t, I tried to protect my team’s HVT and kill the other team’s target. If I was the HVT, I focused on hunting other players down with my teammates in order to build up our score. Kill Order is the most fun I’ve had with a Team Deathmatch-style mode in years, and I can’t wait to play more.
The making of Kill Order
Speaking to developers from Treyarch about the creation of Kill Order, I learned that the team spent a lot of time looking at what worked and what didn’t with past Call of Duty modes. “We’ve made other modes that we thought were really high-quality and good, but players just didn’t engage,” director of production Yale Miller tells Tech Reader. “They played a little bit at the beginning, and then they weren’t into it.”
Treyarch found these less-popular modes to be more demanding and complex. They asked players to think about a lot more while juggling the core deathmatch or objective foundations. Associate director of design Matt Scronce says that the main goal with Kill Order was to combine the approachability of slayer-focused modes like TDM with the more tactical, objective-based play of other Black Ops modes.
“For us, it was really important to have an approachable game mode where it’s easy to just hop in and play,” Scronce tells Tech Reader. “I was pushing us to make something that’s slayer-heavy but also brings some of those TDM players over to play the objective a little bit. This felt like the perfect fit. It really just comes down to slaying, but you’ve also got these moving objectives, which are your High Value Targets.”
Scronce also says that Treyarch wants to “make everybody feel like an action hero” with Black Ops 6. This is already partially done through the inclusion of the omnimovement system across all Black Ops 6 multiplayer modes, but that mentality also applies to Kill Order. Specifically, Treyarch wanted to make sure that every player in a match had the chance to become an HVT.
“If it’s just the player with the best score, then that’s probably always going to be the same two players,” Stronce says. “Now, we’re randomly picking the High Value Target each time you die and respawn. We want it to be approachable. We want it to be mainly about slaying, but also bring in some objective gameplay and give everybody a chance to be a High Value Target.”
Kill Order benefits from the smaller map sizes in Black Ops 6, which Miller says the team felt safe doing because Warzone and its larger Black Ops crossover Resurgence map Area 99 exist. The HVT dies often, which gives the match a fast pace. Of all the multiplayer matches of Black Ops 6 I played this week, the most fun I had was in Kill Order matches. That speaks to just how appealing this new mode is and why I think all Black Ops 6 players should give it a shot instead of just gravitating to traditional modes like TDM or Domination.
Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 will launch for PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S on October 25. Early access to its beta is available between August 30 and September to those who preordered or are subscribed to Xbox Game Pass. An open beta with all the same content will take place between September 6 and September 9 as well.
