Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 developers say the avalanche of weird skins is to 'maximize fun for players', whatever that means

pcgamer.com:

For the past handful of years, Black Ops has been increasingly—as our own Ted Litchfield put it—suffering from a case of 'Fortnitification'. That is, whatever core aesthetic identity it had is due to vanish into the hole of crossovers and garish skins. While there's been a quiet murmuring of fury from the community over these things, these games' developers must be making an absolute boatload of money, because the cruise liner's still chugging.

In the past year of Call of Duty games we've endured a pay-to-win Groot knockoff, Nicki Minaj, and a Fallout crossover. Black Ops 6, which released at the tail end of October, has been carrying on this new tradition by throwing demons, dragons, flaming skulls, a bong gun, and a catgirl into the mix. I'm actually less upset about that last one.

But why, fans might ask? Because it's fun, reply Black Ops 6's developers. No, really. In a recent interview with Dexerto, Treyarch's associate creative director, Miles Leslie, says it's all about cramming the most 'fun' into the game.

«Fun always comes first for us,» Leslie states. «Of course, we want to stay grounded in the DNA that makes a Black Ops game unique when it comes to core gameplay, but we also like to break the rules if it’s going to maximize fun for players.»

I'm not entirely sure what maximising my fun would look like, given the ephemeral nature of entertainment as a concept—one could make the very salient argument that this aesthetic 180 is, at best, fun for some players and a bummer for others. Some people don't want to see a half-dragon romping around their modern military shooter before getting shot dead and summarily t-bagged by a catgirl. I mean, I've got no skin in that particular game, but even I can tell when a shark is being jumped. There's actually a shark skin, by the way.

Still, Leslie insists, it's just a natural evolution of the kind of zaniness found in the ever-popular and longstanding CoD Zombies mode: «When it comes to cosmetics, the Black Ops series