Black Ops 7 has problems, but Call of Duty recognizes where the wind is blowing: The triumphant return of loose SBMM and persistent lobbies in the FPS
FOV 90
Welcome to FOV 90, an FPS column from staff writer Morgan Park. Every week, I’ll be covering a topic relevant to first-person shooter enjoyers, spanning everything from multiplayer and singleplayer to the old and the new.
My first night with Black Ops 7 went as well as expected. After scoping out the first few missions of the bizarre co-op campaign with friends, we hopped into 6v6 multiplayer, making a point to stick to the “open” playlists with “minimal” skill-based matchmaking.
Blops 7 is giving me every reason to hang it up early and return to Battlefield 6, except I’ve been successfully charmed by two things it does well: Loose skill-based matchmaking, and persistent lobbies.
I used to think the “anti-SBMM” crowd in Call of Duty was simply YouTubers and streamers advocating for a matchmaking algorithm that favors their own high skill. That is absolutely part of it, but there’s a real argument to be made for the variety of random placement. After a three-hour session last night, Call of Duty’s new low-SBMM initiative is, surprisingly, fine. Good, even.
A few matches were total stomps one way or the other, but most were fairly close, and interestingly, the presence of super sweaty players was unusually low—you can always identify them because they’re never playing the objective but they are habitually sliding around corners and using the most hideous gun skins you’ll ever see.
It took returning to older server-based shooters like Team Fortress 2 earlier this year to remind me that the FPS felt more casual before SBMM took over in the 2010s. When you only group together players who play like you, you end up with matches that feel exactly the same. Under the looser grip of Blops 7, matches were less predictable and consistently chill.
If open matchmaking is bringing out the normal side of Call of Duty once again, then it was a great decision to also bring back persistent lobbies, Blops 7’s other big win, at the same time.
It sounds like such a minor background detail to automatically keep players together from one match to the next, but the effect is immediately apparent. Since most people stick around for at least two to three matches, you start to recognize the names on the other team, develop rivalries, and pick up on their habits. It’s sort of like a classic server browser experience, but inherently fleeting.
Sometimes, persistence means the guy who made your last match hell is now your clutch teammate. Other times, you develop a wordless synergy with a stranger, or decide to stick around because your team is actually capturing flags in Domination. Occasionally, a lobby is just weird in a way you don’t mind. Last night, one lobby was treated to a multi-part story from two high school friends recounting a fight that happened at school. Thanks to persistent lobbies the story wasn’t cut off after a match ended, so I didn’t miss the stunning conclusion where one of them ate pizza that night.
Jokes aside: Persistent lobbies are a big step toward Call of Duty becoming a social space again, instead of a series of isolated beatdowns. Of course, that swings both ways. Sometimes you’ll find yourself persisting in a room full of people you’d very much like to avoid for one reason or another. For that scenario, Activision included a handy “Find a new lobby” button.
Is Blops 7 the best game in which to enjoy these “new old” features of FPS past? Hell no. Battlefield 6 also has minimal SBMM in its official matchmaking, plus a server browser that allows for always-on servers (when it’s not buggy or filled with XP farms). It’s the better game without a doubt, but Call of Duty deserves some credit for finally trying a more organic matchmaking method—one that flies in the face of its own internal testing that suggests players prefer SBMM.
In fact, it’s remarkable that both of the year’s big tentpole military shooters are prioritizing social play in ways that were quickly going extinct in the genre just a handful of years ago.
