Players have discovered that Blackout, Call of Duty: Black Ops 4’s battle royale mode, has an easily-exploitable feature. Using ‘gestures,’ Black Ops’ term for what we usually call emotes, players gain an unfair tactical advantage thanks to the camera pulling out to third-person, allowing them to see around obstacles and corners.
Obviously, this is pretty frustrating for players who are trying to sneak up on their opponents. And if you’re hiding behind a tree, you really shouldn’t be able to check to see if someone is approaching without exposing yourself to potential incoming fire. But by simply using a gesture, you can get a pretty good view of the other side of your cover by rotating the camera from side to side. The third-person perspective gives a wide-angle view from a disembodied POV, allowing you to see right around anything you’re hiding behind.
Players have taken notice of the exploit, tweeting about it enough to create a Twitter moment, which rounds up some of the example clips they’ve recorded of emote-peeking in action, as well as some meme-heavy reactions.
Here are a couple examples:
Sprays and emotes in Black Ops 4
I'm a bit worried about third person peeking cheese.. pic.twitter.com/AxZhCHPH3l
— TmarTn (@TmarTn) October 11, 2018
Emote peeking is OP! pic.twitter.com/JGDMlNB1hr
— Samurai Bruce (@LastSamurai04) October 12, 2018
Fortunately, Treyarch has noticed the exploit too, and the company says it has a plan to address the issue in an upcoming patch. Friday, Treyarch posted the first round of post-launch patch notes to the Black Ops 4 subreddit, and included some plans for the near future. Emote peeking is at the top of the list.
“We’re currently working on an update that creates two systems for Gestures – the default system that is in the game now, and a competitive version that disables free look and applies different camera settings to prevent using it to see around corners,” the company said. “We want players to always have fun with Gestures as intended, but never at the expense of fair gameplay!”
Treyarch says that new system is in development, along with a few other planned features like tweaks to Domination spawning and a fix a bug that causes Razor Wire to trigger “team kill” detection.