That Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 beta last month didn’t totally sell me on the next 12 months of CoD, but the fact that Treyarch is leaving one of the most annoying, disliked weapons behind is scoring some points with me. For the first time in years, Call of Duty will launch without a riot shield (as noticed by Dexerto).
Oh, the riot shield. The slab of bulletproof glass with a handle bolted onto it hasn’t made the cut in every entry in the series (most recently sitting out 2020’s Black Ops Cold War), but it’s been a mainstay of Call of Duty’s “melee” category going on a decade.
The riot shield’s role in the CoD arsenal is as unique as it is controversial. Every year the weapon appears, old arguments boil back to the surface: Many believe a shield that blocks all bullets from the front is terrible for CoD’s balance because it allows for cheesy melee kills and forces people to awkwardly play around it. Others argue that the shield isn’t all that good when it comes down to it, and it’s not that hard to throw a flashbang at the problem.
Treyarch’s opinion is clear. The Black Ops series has entertained the riot shield in various forms—most notably in Black Ops 4, where one operator carried a riot shield with a pistol slot you could shoot through—but Black Ops 6 will be Treyarch’s second game in a row that skips over shields entirely. At least, that’s how it looks for now. There’s always a possibility that a shield will pop up in a post-release update between now and next October, but shield lovers shouldn’t hold their breath.
Such is the Call of Duty teeter-totter. This year we get no riot shield, but we do get a different collection of strange melee options: a baseball bat unlocked at level 52 and, if Treyarch’s habits hold, maybe an explosive crossbow or ballistic knife sometime next year.
