The new Multiplayer maps are split into two main categories: 12 brand-new Core 6v6 maps and four compact-sized Strike maps designed to be played in either 6v6 Faceoff or 2v2 configurations. Those of you who have access to the upcoming Closed Beta will get a chance to dive in and experience Babylon, Derelict, Rewind, Scud, Skyline, Gala, Pit, and Stakeout.

And what good are maps without a ton of games modes to play them on? And it’s not just about simply adding classic modes like Team Deathmatch, Gunfight, Domination, or Hardpoint. We’re told Treyarch have spent a significant amount of time looking at all the core modes and adjusting to suit the unique Black Ops 6 style of play.

This will also include a brand-new game mode that you can take for a spin when the Beta kicks off on August 30: Kill Order. The component behind Kill Order is protecting your team’s High Value Target (HVT), while trying to eliminate your enemy’s HVT. It features two teams of six, where teams score points for all eliminations, but taking out a HVT will yield a larger number of points. Sounds chaotic; can’t wait!

Other tweaks that have taken place are Time to Kill (TTK) being tuned to be a little bit faster than the previous Black Ops game, various settings for your in-game HUD, a variety of audio improvements, and slide canceling. You can get a full breakdown on all the Multiplayer features here on the official Call of Duty Blog which also details features like Loadouts, Combat Specialties, and more.

Global Gameplay Systems Intel

Omnimovement, Gunsmith changes, Global Weapon Builds, Classic Prestige, and Mastery Camos will be some of the primary innovations you can look forward to across Multiplayer Zombies, and Warzone modes, but perhaps none will be as game changing as Omnimovement.

The way it works is this: Omnimovement will let you chain combat maneuvers together, like sliding, sprinting, and diving, all with a full 360 degrees range of motion (the upcoming Closed Beta will be a great chance for you to try this in action). It’s basically giving you all the tools to be a full-blown action hero, like shooting while diving forward, sideways, or backwards. Or pulling off combat dives off the edge of a building, rotating yourself in mid-air to face an enemy, and opening fire — there’s going to be a lot of incredible ways for you engage opponents.

Black Ops 6 is also going to feature Intelligent Movement, allowing you to customize how Operatives move through the field. These include Sprint Assist (auto-applies your preferred Sprint); Mantle Assist (auto mantle over objects); Crouch Assist (crouching while moving through a usable opening); Corner Slice (sloping your weapon when moving around corners).

You can get a full rundown on all the other Gameplay Systems on the official Call of Duty Blog that will cover things like the new Gunsmith system, Reticle challenges, Weapon and Mastery camos, and much more. Read about it here.

Warzone Integrations

We also got a look at the first gameplay of the new Area 99 Resurgence Map coming later this year to Warzone, as part of Season 1. Set within the Nevada desert, Area 99 was a secret government site built in the late 1940s, hidden just out of sight from the Nuketown testing site. Designed for radiation testing, this region was abandoned shortly after a reactor leak, and all work was erased by the government. Taking inspiration from the classic Multiplayer map Nuketown, Treyarch analyzed what makes that map so special, then building out its lore and implementing new Warzone mechanics with a variety of challenging and compact locations throughout.

There are several unique locations to explore here, each having a dash of retrofuturism behind them. Some notable ones include Reactor, which is focused on a massive reactor tower that is slowly leaking radiation; Nuketown Shipping that is highlighted by a shipping yard and gigantic crane; and the Mannequin Assembly plant which features (you guessed it) a factory full of creepy mannequins.

Also, while it was great to learn more about what’s going to be new for Warzone like Omnimovement integration, it was equally great to hear that Warzone will support Carry Forward Content. That means the weapons, blueprints, Operators and Skins, and many cosmetics from Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II and Modern Warfare III, can be carried over, as well as full integration into the gameplay and cosmetic content of Black Ops 6.

There will also be some other larger changes based on Raven’s learnings from the Call of Duty: Modern Warfare era of Warzone, all the way back to the original map, Verdansk, and working to focus this iteration for Warzone on more simplicity. One of these will be an effort to make setting your non-Loadout inventory a bit easier by removing backpacks, with a series of inventory slots for items like Gas Masks, Killstreaks, Armor Plates, and more. You can learn more about this feature and all the other changes for Warzone by checking out the Call of Duty Blog’s deep dive on everything from Perks to Vehicles to Warzone Mobile and more here.

Zombies Intel

Coming out of Call of Duty: NEXT, we’re excited to share even more details regarding Round-Based Zombies in Black Ops 6, including information on Liberty Falls, Story Mode, Wonder Weapons, and more.

First up is Liberty Falls, the second “medium-sized” Zombies map that will be available at launch for Call of Duty: Black Ops 6. Liberty Falls was once an idyllic town in West Virgina; now it has been consumed by this bloody outbreak of Zombies. Here you’ll navigate its narrow streets and do battle at various landmarks like churches, banks, and even a comics store to give this a true hometown-gone-wrong feeling, complimented by undead cheerleaders, deputies, and other townsfolk covered in tattered plaid.

We also got confirmation that every Zombies map coming to Black Ops 6 will include a “multi-stage Main Quest,” with Treyarch assuring us that they will be involved, difficult, and entertaining with plenty of awards being handed out for completing them. There will also be Directed Mode, which is great for new players to jump in and get a feel for this unique gaming world, allowing them more assistance in completing the Main Quest.

When traversing Liberty Falls, you’ll also be able to get your hands on some Perks to help with your battle against the undead. Some notable Perks that caught our attention were the Deadshot Daiquiri, that helps your aim of sight to target critical locations on enemies; Elemental Pop, which gives a small chance of a random Ammo Mod effect to every bullet you fire; and Jugger-Nog, which can increase your max health by 100. Learn more about Perks as well as Augments and how GobbleGum works here on the official Call of Duty Blog.

You can try out some of these features starting soon by pre-ordering Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 on the Microsoft Store or subscribe to select Game Pass plans to get early access to the Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 Open Beta which kicks off August 30, 2024. This is your first chance to go hands on with Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 and provide essential feedback to help ensure the best day one experience possible. Learn more here.

Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 is currently available for pre-order on the Microsoft Store and will launch October 25, 2024, for Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, Windows PC, and will be available day one with Game Pass.

It also made a trek from Berlin to Tokyo in the same year, proving to be one of the most innovative and technologically advanced airliners… for a brief time. World War II would dramatically change this era of aviation, and the Condor was soon repurposed for military service.  

By the end of the war, only a handful of Condors remained outside of Germany and very little engineering documentation survived. It wasn’t long until spare parts were becoming harder to come by, leading to its grounding and eventual scrapping. This left the Condor, one of the most innovative airliners ever built for its time, essentially lost to history.

“The Condor is kind of a missing link in the development of airliners in Germany, or Europe, before the war. In a way it is a connection between the very first wooden airliners from the 1920s and the Airbus of the 1970s,” explains Heiko Triesch, Head of the Aerospace Department at the German Museum of Technology.

Triesch and a group of volunteers wanted to help restore that missing link, and commissioned the salvage operation of a Condor that had been discovered at the bottom of Trondeim Fjord in Norway. The aircraft was basically in shambles, but a group of enthusiasts were determined to bring the Condor back to life. With assistance from Airbus, and Triesch’s museum, they went to work, calling themselves the “Condorians.”

“There was a core team [of volunteers] at the beginning of the restoration project in 2002 that had done their job training in Bremen during World War II at the Focke-Wulf Company, working on FW200 airplanes,” Triesch says. “They would later become railway drivers or technicians — [you were] not allowed to work on aircraft in Germany for a period of 10 years after the war — but their fascination for aviation never stopped. They became the first volunteers working on the Condor; no one knew more about this aircraft than those veterans.” 

The team started with a wreck, significantly destroyed due to saltwater erosion damage. With limited engineering knowledge on how to repair it, it would take some time to begin piecing the Condor back together — but they were determined to figure it out. With a patchwork of parts taken from various other wrecks recovered from around Europe over the years, the restoration of the Condor would take the better part of two decades to complete, finishing recently in 2021. It was around this time that Neumann had reached out with the idea of bringing the Condor to Microsoft Flight Simulator.

“I read the story years ago and knew about the recovery efforts, and that people were reconstructing the Condor,” describes Neumann. “Then it resurfaced all these years later that they had breakthroughs and [had put] the plane back together again. I contacted them and said I have this goal in Microsoft Flight Simulator to preserve aircraft that have sort of been lost in time and they allowed us to come visit and scan the plane.”

But that wasn’t Microsoft Flight Simulator’s only contribution to preserving the memory of this aircraft. The Condorians had the plane, but they didn’t have the cockpit. It turned out, a private collector in Switzerland had put together a Condor cockpit dash but was looking to part with his collection. Microsoft purchased this collection and gave it to the museum, thus giving them an even more complete version of the Condor, which in turn helped bring an even more detailed model into Microsoft Flight Simulator. Neumann highlights the cockpit as the element he’s most proud of being able to reproduce for this Local Legend. – and isn’t coy about implying that this might be the best work the team has done to date.

“We brought two different groups together [for the Condor in Microsoft Flight Simulator],” Neumann tells me. “First, we have a company called iniBuilds that typically makes our airliners. They worked on the A320neo and they’re making an A330 for Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024. They are top notch, the best of best in the industry to make airliners [for flight simulators]. And secondly, we worked with Oliver Moser, who I would call a highly enthusiastic aviation fanatic. He inundates himself and basically gets every book, newspaper, or any piece of information he can get. He’s German, so he has a much easier time with the [Condor] documentation and is probably now one of the most foremost knowledgeable people in the world on the subject. He’s responsible for the flight model and the flight deck and everything, while iniBuilds is providing the artwork, the animation, the sounds, and all that.”

This collaboration paid off in creating a highly detailed representation of the Condor, inside and out. Oftentimes when Microsoft and a partner create a Local Legend, there is not enough information available to create a highly accurate representation of a cockpit. Cockpits are usually not preserved in most museum pieces and there usually are also not sufficiently detailed photographs available to really have high confidence that everything is historically 100% accurate, but in the case of the Condor, the team had sufficient information to get everything correct. 

In talking to Triesch, I was curious to know what he thought now that the Condor will now be able to “live on” as a digital preservation flight model in Microsoft Flight Simulator: “I remember there were many talks about just trying to get an engine to run, or ‘We’re sorry, this aircraft will never fly again,’ but now we can! For me it’s a miracle. I was told the Fw 200 is gone forever. Now we have an aircraft in Tempelhof and Microsoft Flight Simulator has made it possible to fly it again!”

“When you think about these people spending 20 to 22 years of their life, remaking every inch of this aircraft, for them to know that this [now enables] us to make it an authentic digital model that can be enjoyed by millions of people – yeah, I think it’s super exciting for them,” Neumann adds. “I think we sort of take aviation for granted these days, but it’s these pioneers and early innovations that are really making all this possible. And I think the Condor plays an important part in that story. And it’s a beautiful, beautiful plane.”

The Fw 200 Condor is available now in Microsoft Flight Simulator’s digital marketplace.