We've seen some unique approaches to arachnophobia modes in video games as they've started to become more common in recent years, but nothing like Call of Duty: Black Ops 6's new approach. Activision's solution somehow makes everything is even more horrible, by stealing the legs from your zombie spiders and turning them into something possibly worse.
“For the first time in Black Ops 6 Zombies, a new Arachnophobia toggle feature will be available,” Activision writes in a post describing Black Ops 6's new accessibility features on its blog. “This setting will allow players to change the appearance of spider-like enemies in Zombies without affecting their gameplay.”
All of which sounds perfectly reasonable and good. After all, modes of arachnophobia are far from unusual these days, even if their approaches are rarely the same. Developer Coffee Stain opted to replace spiders with adorable cat images in Satisfactory, for example, while Obsidian's Grounded, a game full of stuff, allowed players to dial spider details up to the “innocuous circle.” Meanwhile, Dragon Age: The Veilguard's solution is a bit more scorched earth, simply eradicating the game's spider population entirely.
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However, Black Ops 6 developer Treyarch's approach to the spider problem is something completely different, with the studio apparently taking Obsdian's 'floating blob' solution as a starting point by removing the legs from its zombie arachnids and then, well, it stopped there. What would be cool if the end result was some kind of mutated giant shrimp? Sperm?! – wasn't somehow more disturbing. Still, I guess at least the nightmares won't be spider nightmares.
Elsewhere in its post, Activision highlights a couple of other interesting new accessibility features for the Call of Duty series, including the asymmetric hearing compensation setting, which allows players to create custom audio profiles and adjust separate settings for each ear. Which, speaking as someone who's had unbalanced hearing since a childhood encounter with a lake, is something I'd definitely love to see more games adopt.
Black Ops 6 also includes an expanded High Contrast mode designed to help players with low vision or color blindness by allowing them to toggle a “dark background” setting or customize outline colors for allies and enemies. This, of course, turned out to be a surprise to some players at launch after they turned on the game and discovered that everyone was blue.
Additionally, Black Ops 6 introduces what Activision calls Intelligent Motion, intended to help players with mobility issues reduce input by minimizing and customizing button and lever processes. This is in addition to new HUD customization features, used to switch between layout presets and adjust minimap colors, plus support for the Xbox Adaptive Controller and Sony Access Controller. It is now also possible to pause and save during solo Zombies games.
Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 is now available for PC, PlayStation 4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series for the future of Microsoft's subscription service.