Call of Duty: Black Ops dev explains plans for knives and sniper rifles

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MEDIC! Come patch this game up or I'll shoot your balls off!

Some recent forum posts have revealed Treyarch's plans to fine tune the sniper file and knife attacks, hoping to address complaints that sniper rifles are too weak, and knife lunge is too powerful. The changes will hit in the next Call of Duty: Black Ops update, and you can read about them below.

  • Increased headshot multipliers for sniper rifles. Sniper rifles with suppressors equipped will now always be ensured one-shot kill headshots.

  • Subtle increase in sniper rifle accuracy when scoping in.

Treyarch caused some controversy when they removed the ability to quickscope with a sniper rifle, and admit that it has weakened the weapon as a choice. Vahn says “we stopped Quick Scoping for the most part. We mostly invalidated a sniper winning a battle with a Shotgun or SMG at close range. This was the goal. However, this has come at a pretty large cost to sniping in general.” Beyond the changes listed above, there are more tweaks planned to fine tune the sway of the scope when aiming, but these will come in later updates.

As for the knife , Vahn had this to say.

“We've made some changes to the knife tunables that will be available in the next game update.

We are not currently planning to remove the lunge, make the knife a 2 hit kill in the front, or make you pull it out to use it. These are all good community suggestions that are appropriate for a future game that has a Barebones or Pure version.

That said, after thinking about a bit more, it seemed reasonable that we could do additional (and larger) experiments on the lunge and swipe ranges and see how they play out.”

Fore more Call of Duty: Black Ops goodness, check out the Call of Duty: Black Ops Mythbusters video, and our pick of the eight funniest Call of Duty: Black Ops kills .

Tom Senior
Tom Senior

Part of the UK team, Tom was with PC Gamer at the very beginning of the website's launch—first as a news writer, and then as online editor until his departure in 2020. His specialties are strategy games, action RPGs, hack ‘n slash games, digital card games… basically anything that he can fit on a hard drive. His final boss form is Deckard Cain.