Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War beta changes, patch notes

New functionality, maps, and modes are coming to Black Ops Cold War when the new beta kicks off.

Treyarch has announced “VIP Escort, Combined Arms: Assault, Fireteam: Dirty Bomb, [an] FOV slider on consoles, and more.”

Based on data and player feedback from the earlier alpha playtest, the developer has made adjustments to movement, weapon tuning, player spawns, visual fidelity, and more.

Black Ops Cold War beta patch notes

“We’ve made a large tuning pass on core movement with the goal of improving the responsiveness of player controls and actions,” Treyarch writes.

“We’ve identified several key areas in our core movement set for improvements, largely focused on sprinting and sliding.”

• Integrated updated locomotion animations and systems for walking, jogging, and sprinting.
• Slightly increased acceleration when moving from a standstill.
• Reduced or removed several sprint penalties that could leave the player in a state of reduced sprint speed. This results in more opportunities to use the Sprint Takeoff feature for a quick burst of speed when initiating a sprint.
• Increased the time it takes to ramp down from maximum to minimum sprint speed for a smoother change of speed. This also slightly increases the time at which a player sprints at a faster pace.
• Slightly adjusted camera bob during sprint to better align with updated movement animations.
• Disabled Field of View increase when sprinting. This should provide a smoother in-game view and prevent a “floating camera” feeling when sprinting.
• Slightly reduced slide speed.
• Increased the minimum amount of time a player must sprint before sliding to better align with time to reach max sprint speed. This means a player cannot immediately trigger a slide from a near-standstill.
• Addressed an issue that allowed players to cancel a slide without the appropriate slowdown. We will continue to monitor and investigate any slide-cancel exploits.

“We’ve refined our weapons tech and animations since the alpha, completed numerous tuning and tweaking passes on our weapons, and added more details to attachment statistics in Gunsmith,” Treyarch said.

“We’ve also made several positive changes to how sniper rifles work based on alpha data and feedback.”

• Added a more detailed breakdown of statistics for each attachment, explaining in detail how each attachment influences its weapon’s stats.
• Moved the Gunsmith UI button closer to the weapon for easier access.
• Added new weapon-recoil systems and firing animations, with a comprehensive tuning pass for a revamped weapon-firing feel on every weapon for both hip-fire and ADS.
• Reworked and rebalanced all recoil patterns, impacting weapon balance and mastery across the board.
• Full touch-up pass on animations across all weapons based on feedback.
• Added new [aim-down-sights] weapon-rendering technology for more realistic ADS perspective.
• Smoothed out all ADS in/out transitions.
• Made tuning changes to alpha weapons that overperformed or underperformed, including increases to AK-74u recoil and ADS time, increasing LMG ammo capacity, and more.
• Full attachment-balance pass to ensure all attachments stay relevant and balanced.
• Added aim assist on snipers for controller users for cross-platform balancing.
• Several precision-aiming adjustments to help the sniping experience feel more fluid.
• Sniper glint now displays more often and more reliably to help players understand when they are in danger.
• Adjusted ADS time on sniper rifles.
• Sniper rifles now require higher hits on the body for one-hit eliminations (for example, upper chest instead of stomach, or upper arm instead of lower arm).
• Reduced the fuse time on the frag grenade for beta. Throw-speed adjustments are targeted for launch.

Other improvements include changes to graphical fidelity, performance, lighting, audio, scorestreak-system adjustments, vehicle tunings, and bug fixings.

The game also now features a “ping” system across all multiplayer gametypes, allowing players to mark locations for their teammates.

Black Ops Cold War beta schedule

For pre-orders, the beta will run from October 8 at 10 a.m. Pacific till October 12; it’s open to every PS4 user from October 10 through October 12.

Pre-orders on all platforms will have access to the beta from October 15 till October 19. All Xbox and PC users will be able to try the game from October 17 till October 19.

Black Ops Cold War is set to launch on November 13.