Call Of Duty: Black Ops Cold War Dev Teases Sniper Buff

After nerfing the overpowered MP5, it appears Treyarch is setting its sights on changing the values of another Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War weapon, while the studio also also provided some wider context on its approach to buffing and nerfing weapons in the multiplayer shooter.

Lead game designer Tony Flame posted an image on Twitter recently that suggests the M82 sniper rifle will see a buff in an upcoming update. “Next order of business,” Flame wrote, attaching an image of the weapon and a car getting a buff.

Flame also provided some higher-level context regarding how Treyarch approaches buffing and nerfing weapons. He said the studio’s main imperative is to focus on keeping the time-to-kill (TTK) values where they should be across all weapons.

“When a weapon far exceeds that baseline, we must nerf it to respect the TTK, and likewise buff to get it there.”

The first major post-release patch for Black Ops Cold War made a series of buffs and nerfs, including the FFAR1 (increased recoil, reduced max damage and max damage range), M16 (reduced max damage range and increased sprint to fire time, among other things), and all snipers (the sprint to fire time has been adjusted).

Some weapons saw buffs, including the magnum (getting improvements to fire rate and max damage range) and M60 (improved max damage range and movement speed).

Check out the full Black Ops Cold War patch notes to find out everything that’s new and different with the latest update. It’s fair to expect more changes will be coming to Cold War in the future, too–recently, a glitch revealed a way to improve the Cartel map.

GameSpot’s Black Ops Cold War review scored the game a 7/10. “Zombies is a good co-op time overall, but multiplayer falls flat, leaving the strong campaign to do most of the heavy lifting,” review Kallie Plagge said.

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