Sometimes your weapon kit in Call of Duty isn’t doing the work you need it to, but developer Treyarch has a solution for those hunting meta-ready loadouts. Instead of sharing screenshots or asking your friends to screenshare their gunsmith page, Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 will introduce two new ways to quickly share your custom gun build.
While I did improve my gunsmithing skills, the time to pick the right attachments wasn’t free. Often, I’d rather be playing than reading reddit posts about what combination of attachments is going to punish me the least. Treyarch’s solution to sharing your weapons should save me time, headache, and embarrassment.
The first option to share your build is through your friendslists. If one of your friends is dominating the match with their custom weapon build, “You can just send that build directly to them and in a couple clicks, they’ll have it in their loadout and they’ll be using it in the next game,” associate design director Lawrence Metten explains. This freedom to share your kit quickly with your friends meshes with the core focus of Black Ops 7, promoting co-op play and shared progression.
Whether through friendslists or a code, Weapon Kit sharing is a game-changer in Black Ops 7.
The other way to share is with a code. “We know a lot of people share screenshots of the gunsmith. In Black Ops 7, you’re going to have a build code printed right there in the gunsmith, wherever you can see all the attachments equipped to the gun,” Metten continued.
The goal is to cut down friction from seeing a hot build in a video or Reddit post and being able to play with it yourself, and the team is focused on “making it really easy to get your hands on the top Meta builds and the communities build.”
Black Ops 7 Developers saw weapon build sharing as the “natural evolution” of the weapon build system in the previous game. During a media event, the development team revealed that both Black Ops 6 and Black Ops 7 were “concepted and dev[eloped] in parallel.”
This production structure enabled the team to build those unique features for the upcoming weapon system. Miles Leslie, associate creative director, shared that the team has “been building momentum working in parallel with Black Ops 6 and Black Ops 7, which is really feeding off of Black Ops 6 and into this game, and how we can make it feel different.”
Treyarch encourages you to leverage your community with easier weapon kit sharing.
There are so many benefits to leaning on friends and the community for guidance when enhancing customizing your guns. For example, when Call of Duty shifted to a quicker time-to-kill, heavier kits with attachments that slowed your aim-down-sight time were significantly pushed out of the meta.
My kill-death-ratio felt this, as I unlocked new attachments and loaded them up on my weapons, only to die more often. I realized I had less time to land shots with my upgraded guns than when I used my vanilla, attachment free weapons. I spent some time watching YouTube and getting lambasted in my discord server for carrying a fully kitted, but slow-to-aim SMG through close quarters maps like Shipment.
While we had a sneak peek of weapon build sharing during the media preview there are still a few questions that remain. The first: How extensive will the sharing feature be? Next, will gun camos and charms be included? And finally, what about custom build names?
For those details, we’ll have to wait for future updates from Treyarch. However, I welcome any improvement in reproducing builds from screenshots and menu hunting for the right muzzle and stock to copy my favorite streamers’ kit.