When Verdansk came back on April 3, it brought ‘Battle Royale Casual’ with it, an all-new mode packed with bots to give players a much more forgiving experience. Given how I love Call of Duty’s multiplayer platforms but hate sweating against cracked players and the punishing SBMM mechanics, I’m wondering where my ‘Multiplayer Casual’ playlists are.
It’s not an unheard-of concept. In 2022 and 2023, Modern Warfare II and III featured a mode called ‘Invasion’, which was a large-scale multiplayer mode stacked with bots – and it was great.
Let’s get some simple playlists sorted out for the less talented player who just wants to chill out and shoot guns.
No Struggle
Before labelling me a crazy person, look at this. I was inspired to explore this topic thanks to a post on Twitter by DETONATED, which held a poll that had some very telling results:
That post and the subsequent poll got me thinking…
Call of Duty’s skill-based matchmaking mechanics were broken down by their creator during a recent episode of the Insider Gaming Weekly podcast. They’re not as nefarious as you might think, but they’re designed in a way that keeps you on your toes and in lobbies with players around your ‘calculated’ skill level.
It does mean that, at times, you’ll be lumped in with players that walk out of the lobby with a 4.0 K/D.
It was also confirmed a while ago that Call of Duty’s studios never inject bots into any multiplayer matches, which is something that other games have done historically. Sure, they’ve mostly been battle royale games with much higher player counts in a single game, but you can downsize the logic, surely.
Invasion was the perfect example of ‘Multiplayer Casual’. It put players in large, sweeping maps with hundreds of bots and a decent array of real players, making it feel like a full-fledged battlefield (no pun or reference intended). It meant that you’d likely end a match with hundreds of kills, and you never had to go looking for enemies.
Invasion was dropped coming into Black Ops 6, which left a gaping hole in my rotation.
Here’s my question:
If we can have a Battle Royale Casual packed with bots that allows you to experience the same game but earn fewer experience points, why can’t we have a Multiplayer Casual mode that serves the same purpose?
Folks can grind camos, learn the maps, play modes that they usually wouldn’t, experiment with non-meta weapons, and so on, all while avoiding cheaters, punishing SBMM mechanics, and potentially connection issues (if it was entirely a bot lobby, of course).
That poll says that I’m not alone, but I’m just wondering how the logistics of a Multiplayer Casual mode would work.
Let me know what you think about this concept in the comments, or join the community over on the Insider Gaming forum.
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