Call of Duty Black Ops 6 — The upcoming Activision games from Call of Duty may be a breath of fresh air to the franchise with a promise to go back to its roots by focusing on the campaign aspect of the game. Unfortunately, the news from the 2024 Xbox Games Showcase may sour that expectation as the game is said to require a continuous internet connection for players to play.
Activision also added that the “always online” also extends even to the offline campaign mode.
The blog post reveals that the argument behind the inclusion of always online is “to deliver the highest-quality visuals while also reducing the game’s overall storage space on your hard drive”. With CoD Black Ops 6, Activision introduces an alternative way to reduce the size of the game using what they call texture streaming and apparently “you’ll need a continuous internet connection to play any game mode, including Campaign.”
However, this really contradicts to CoD BO 6 official specification which it demands up to 300GB of storage space for the installation— doubling its already huge predecessor Call of Duty Modern Warfare 3. It’s hard to imagine how much the game size was originally without this “texture streaming” tech.
Call of Duty Black Ops 6 Specification Requirements
Surprisingly, the technical requirement for the game isn’t that demanding as it can still run on AMD Radeon RX 470 or NVIDIA GTX 1650 with just 8GB of RAM configuration. The minimum requirement for its CPU includes Intel Core i5-6600 or AMD Ryzen 5 1400.
For the recommended specs, the official site suggests a GTX 1080 Ti or RTX 3060 for NVIDIA, RX 6600 XT for AMD and Arc A770 for Intel discrete graphics card. The RAM requirement also bumps to 16GB and the CPU of Intel i7-6700K or Ryzen 5 1600X for AMD; is still pretty standard.
It can also be noticed that the storage requirement displayed on the official site is “only” half of what they announce during the Xbox Games Showcase. Apparently, Activision has made an error correction that claims the size shown during the showcase is bloated with additional content and localisations.
The tweet also claims that “players will be able to download Black Ops 6 at launch without downloading any other Call of Duty titles or all of the language packs.” But, they also ended the tweet with “the actual estimation of the Black Ops 6 file size will be available closer to launch.”
In other words, everyone is still in the dark about what the actual size will be.
Bottom line
The upcoming game from the Call of Duty franchise has the premise to be a strong hit as it claims to go back to its roots by focusing on the campaign. However, the game is bound to “always online” requirements even when in a single-player campaign. Activision argue that their new “texture streaming” requires an internet connection therefore making it impossible for the game to be played offline.
The game is also rumoured to be 300GB in size; making it one of the biggest games ever that uses that much storage. Though, a recent tweet from Activision says that the size is still yet to be final.
