Call Of Duty: Black Ops Cold War–All Changes Made Between The Alpha And Beta

Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War has two beta weekends coming up, starting with a PS4-exclusive beta on October 8. These betas follow on from September’s PS4 alpha event, and players who jump into both will find that one is very different from the other.

This beta, which will include VIP Escort, Combined Arms: Assault, and Fireteam: Dirty Bomb playlists–as well as the new Cartel map–will feature some more granular differences, too. Treyarch, the developer behind Cold War’s multiplayer, has extensively detailed the differences between the alpha and beta for Cold War, noting every change made based on player feedback.

There have been multiple changes to the way characters move, for instance, with more animations and various tweaks to speed, penalities, and field of view during different types of movement. Here’s the complete list of movement changes.

• Core Movement
  • Integrated updated locomotion animations and systems for walking, jogging, and sprinting.
  • Slightly increased acceleration when moving from a standstill.
• Sprinting
  • 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.
• Sliding
  • 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.

In guns, one of the major changes is that aim assist for snipers on controllers has been brought back. This has not been the case since Black Ops II, but their heightened relevance to Cold War’s multiplayer made this necessary. Here are the changes to weapons and Gunsmith.

• Gunsmith
  • 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.
• Recoil and Firing Animations
  • 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.
• Aim Down Sights (ADS)
  • Added new ADS weapon rendering technology for more realistic ADS perspective.
  • Smoothed out all ADS in/out transitions.
• General Weapon Tuning
  • 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.
• Attachment Tuning
  • Full attachment balance pass to ensure all attachments stay relevant and balanced.
• Sniper Rifles
  • 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 requires higher hits on the body for one-hit eliminations (for example, upper chest instead of stomach, or upper arm instead of lower arm).
• Frag Grenades
  • Reduced the fuse time on the Frag Grenade for Beta. Throw speed adjustments are targeted for launch.

Meanwhile, the Scorestreak system has been changed so that rewards require more points to activate in several modes, so as to “reduce Scorestreak spam and make Scorestreaks more rewarding.” Various improvements to visual and sound design have been made, too, alongside many other changes and additions. It’s worth checking out the full list for more information.

Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War will release on November 13 for PC, PS5, Xbox Series X, PS4, and Xbox One. You can figure out which version is for you with GameSpot’s preorder guide.