Ahead of its full reveal later this week on June 9, some huge new story teasers for Call of Duty Black Ops 6 have emerged in Warzone. Easter eggs, a cutscene starring Black Ops stalwart Frank Woods, and a series of BO6-related rewards are all teeing up a wild narrative that puts Black Ops Cold War’s Russell Adler front and center in the upcoming PS5 and Xbox blockbuster.
As well as being one of the best battle royale games around, Warzone has been regularly used as a vehicle for announcing the next mainline COD title – I fondly remember sprinting to the Verdansk Stadium to watch the reveal trailer of Black Ops Cold War back in the day. Now, some Black Ops 6 mystery is spreading its way into Warzone in preparation for the new FPS game’s proper unveiling after the Xbox Games Showcase.
The most obvious is that at the start of Warzone matches players will now be shown a short cutscene. This sees Frank Woods in a wheelchair, an important detail as this seems to confirm that the events of Black Ops 2 (where he is shot in both kneecaps) is canon. Woods directly addresses you, saying: “New orders kids. We’ve got intel [that] there might be key information here to finally reveal that mole we’ve been hunting. Now get out there and get to work.”
What is that intel? Well, as is demonstrated by Call of Duty YouTuber ‘MrDalekJD’ below, completing contracts will earn you a bunker key card, and if you crack open Bunker 10 in Warzone’s Urzikstan map, inside you’ll find an interesting document. Emblazoned with the CIA logo, it is titled ‘Daily Briefing, Director Daniel Livingstone’.
Interacting with it brings up the following text on screen: “Orders from Livingstone, bring in the traitor Adler.” Well, that’s our “mole” identified, then. To make things even more obvious, you can now find wanted posters in Urzikstan with Adler’s name and face on them too.
It’s clear that Adler is going to play a huge role in the multiplayer game‘s story, and as MrDalekJD highlights, it could also answer a mystery from Black Ops 2 all those years ago. In BO2, there is intel that suggests the game’s big bad, Menendez, has people on the inside of the CIA, but we never find out who. The Black Ops timeline does all line up, date-wise, to allow Adler to potentially be one of those insiders. Ooooh.
Also, three new challenges have been added to the Events tab in Warzone’s rewards section. The first is related to finding the Adler intel, and while you can’t complete it yet (suggesting that more in-game secrets could be on the way this week) the calling card you get as a reward is called The Truth Lies – the marketing strapline that has been used for BO6.
The animated calling card also gives you a quick look at an evidence board, which includes three interesting post-it notes. Two are clearly locations we’ll visit in Black Ops 6 (Kuwait and Washington D.C.) but the third reads ‘Avalon’. There are plenty of places across the US, Canada, and other countries called Avalon, but after some digging online there’s nothing that immediately stands out to me as a likely destination. For this reason, it could be some kind of codeword for some kind of secret operation, location, or person of interest.
There is also another challenge called Purge Sequence, which rewards you with another animated calling card which features computer code and that all important ‘The Truth Lies’ slogan once again. The description for this challenge simply reads: ‘She Never Lets Me Down’, which is linked to the Sally pistols that were unlocked in Warzone a few weeks back and a random piece of graffiti outside a currently-locked bunker. My theory is that once all the Adler intel is added and found, you’ll be able to unlock this final bunker to decrypt some kind of code inside.
So, as you can see, there’s a lot going on in Warzone right now in the build-up to the Black Ops 6 showcase on Sunday. We’re excited to see what BO6 has in store in regards to its campaign, which leaks suggest builds on the open world elements of some Modern Warfare 3 missions. We’d also love to see some multiplayer gameplay and get a first look at Zombies – especially if the leaks and theories around a TranZit return are correct.
Be sure to follow us on Google News, as we’ll be covering all things Black Ops 6 over the coming days and weeks.