Don’t skip Call of Duty: Black Ops 6’s great new mode during its beta

This story is part of our Summer Gaming Marathon series.

The beta for Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 begins tomorrow, and it features eight different modes for players to check out. While I’m guessing most will want to play iconic modes like Team Deathmatch (TDM) or Domination, I recommend you give Kill Order a shot.

Kill Order is a mode new inBlack Ops 6 that finds a way to twist the core TDM formula to make it less chaotic. I spoke to developers at Treyarch about its creation and learned that Kill Order works as well as it does because it was built around the aspects of Call of Duty that players like best.

A high-value mode

At its core, Kill Order is TDM with a twist. The basics will be familiar as two teams of six compete to get the most kills, earn points, and win a match. To help focus the action, one player on each team is named the “High Value Target.” This “HVT,” as the game and developers call it, is powered up with extra armor, directional indicators for other players on the minimap, and the ability to earn more score with each enemy kill. They’re not a juggernaut or anything, but in a one-on-one between an HVT and an enemy player, the HVT is more likely to win.

The downside is that all players can see where the HVTs on each team are, so they can play the objective and focus on killing the HVT to earn a lot of points as well. A new HVT is picked at random after one dies, so Kill Order has the cadence of a TDM match rather than the tenser pace of Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War’s VIP Escort mode. During my hands-on time with Black Ops 6’s multiplayer at Call of Duty Next in Washington, D.C., I fell in love with Kill Order.

I tend to be the kind of person who plays the objective in a shooter, and the chaos of Call of Duty TDM is often too overwhelming to be fun for me. With Kill Order, I had a goal whether I was the HVT or not. When I wasn’t, I tried to protect my team’s HVT and kill the other team’s target. If I was the HVT, I focused on hunting other players