New Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 gameplay shows a meaty chunk of campaign we'll all forget about once we click 'Multiplayer'

Follow the Call of Duty series long enough and you'll recognize exactly the place we're in with Black Ops 6: The game is revealed, we know one major change coming to multiplayer (sprinting in any direction), and now it's time for the campaign. Activision debuted six minutes of campaign gameplay at Gamescom Opening Night Live with a standard CoD dose of stacking up on doorways, shooting at a big armored guy with a minigun, and riding on the back of a vehicle while more shooting happens.

Looks as fun as any Black Ops campaign, and it'd be hard to do any worse than the disaster that was Modern Warfare 3's story, but let's be honest: We're gonna forget all about Adler and his gang of executive branch-approved buds as soon as the Black Ops 6 campaign is over. I can't think of a series for which the singleplayer portion of a game is less consequential. What CoD players spend 99% of their time on, and what we still know little about, is multiplayer. Treyarch's lips are sealed on that front until the CoD Next event later this month.

That's not to say we shouldn't be enthusiastic about another Blops story. Sure, CoD has gotten so used to repeating itself that anyone could've predicted that elevator shaft would somehow blow up as they were hanging from those cables, but I enjoy my yearly check-in with the big-budget FPS campaign. We don't get many of those anymore, and while CoD's stories only seem to be getting shorter with time, the Blops games usually manage one or two genuine surprises, like Cold War's complex Kremlin infiltration mission.

I just don't think we should pretend the Blops 6 campaign matters. People used to say that Activision only makes Call of Duty campaigns so it has a bunch of exciting set pieces to cut trailers with, and I think that feels true now more than ever. Activision has so many coals in the fire with this series—multiplayer, zombies, Warzone, mobile—that there's a sort of unspoken understanding in the community that campaigns are just a fun little appetizer for the real game. When they're good, they set the tone nicely for our next hundred hours of multiplayer. When they're bad, you can't help but wonder if singleplayer CoD should finally throw in the towel.

Black Ops 6 is out October 25, but the full multiplayer reveal and beta kick off at the end of the month: August 30 to September 4.