With Call of Duty: Black Ops 6’s preseason out of the way, a year of fresh new content drops awaits players of this year’s insanely successful premium COD from Treyarch Studios and Raven Software. Regardless of whether you bought Black Ops 6 outright or are playing via your Xbox Game Pass subscription, you’re probably wondering how much a year of extra content is going to cost you.
Is Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 DLC free?
The good news is—It’s free! Mostly. Allow me to elaborate. New maps, weapons, and perks for both Call of Duty: Warzone and Black Ops 6 are free as part of the Seasonal content update. This includes all new maps for multiplayer, zombies mode, and Warzone.
A Battle Pass for Season 1 will be available for 1100 COD Points which will contain both free and premium (read: paid) unlockable cosmetics. The Season 1 battle pass for Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 will include 110 pieces of unlockable content, and those with the bonus BlackCell upgrade will have an additional 20 pieces of unlockable content to go for. Operator Bundles and weapon blueprint bundles from the store have varied prices, from as little as 1000 COD points to as much as 3200 COD points. In real cash, this is rough $10-$30 USD.
Back in the “before times” of Call of Duty, before Battle Royales and even Loot Boxes were common microtransactions, the franchise relied on DLC packs released every few months to provide post-launch content to players in exchange for cold, hard cash. DLC packs typically included a few new maps for multiplayer. If we were really lucky and Treyarch were the developers that year, there would also be a new map for the Zombies tie-in for that year.
The problem with these DLC packs was that they fragmented the player base. If one person in your squad didn’t buy the DLC packs, your entire group would be locked out of playing the maps it contained.
With the launch of 2019’s Modern Warfare, Activision and the Call of Duty team decided it was time for a change and made the leap to free, post-launch multiplayer maps and modes for all players simultaneously on all platforms. Black Ops 6 continues this post-launch content release, although the offerings for post-launch content have grown significantly since Modern Warfare 2019 kicked things off.
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Season 1 for Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 is starting strong when it comes to new maps and modes. Players can look forward to three new maps at launch, with three more to be released halfway through the season with the “Season 1 Reloaded” update. Seasonal content maps are typically a collection of new maps and variants or remasters of well-known maps from Call of Duty titles of yesteryear. Call of Duty: Warzone will also get a new Resurgence map with Area 99, as well as additional Season 1 changes for Warzone.
Major seasonal content updates will roll out bi-monthly for Call of Duty: Black Ops 6, with smaller “Reloaded” content drops halfway through each season.
The Call of Duty in-game store
While maps, weapons, perks, and generally any gameplay element that can affect the outcome of matches can be expected to be free, there is still paid DLC in Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 in the form of Operator Bundles and weapon blueprints. This also includes Battle Pass and BlackCell content, which offers additional cosmetics that can only be unlocked by those who own the corresponding pass during the active Season. Once the Season is gone, these items are no longer attainable. Hooray for FOMO!
Operator bundles and weapon blueprints are a little different, however. They remain available in the in-game Call of Duty store in perpetuity. There are some exceptions—the Call of Duty Endowment Endeavor pack was recently removed after reaching its fundraising goal, for example. But in general, if you like an Operator bundle and want to buy it, you don’t need to go into debt to grab it during any one specific season. The added bonus is that these bundles are also cross-compatible with Warzone and across platforms. So if you really like that operator bundle you just coughed up $30 for in Black Ops 6, you can use it in both games and on Xbox or PC interchangeably without paying multiple times.
Unfortunately, Battle Passes, BlackCell upgrades, and most items in the Call of Duty store require COD points to purchase. That means you’ve got to convert your dollars into in-game currency before you can buy them. Unlike the items that you purchase COD points with, the points themselves are not cross-platform compatible. You must spend the COD points you have on the platform you purchase them on. After that, you can use the product you purchased with COD points wherever you wish.
