The real Call of Duty: what it takes to survive a real Black Ops mission
How real is Call of Duty? We enlist ex-Special Forces to find out
With enough practice, anyone can pull off a mission-winning killstreak in an online shooter. But what does it take to go from behind the controller and out onto the real-world battlefield?
Ahead of this week’s release of Call of Duty: Black Ops 6, we sat down with three ex-Special Forces operatives to find out.
Outdoor apparel brand ThruDark’s co-founders Anthony ‘Staz’ Stazicker and Louis Tinsley spent a combined 27 years in the British military — 18 of those years spent in the UK Special Forces — before turning their sights on extreme weather clothing.
Along with brand ambassador Jason ‘Foxy’ Fox (SAS: Who Dares Wins star with 20 years in the military, 10 as a Royal Marine Commando, 10 in the Special Forces), they’ve worked with Call of Duty developer Treyarch to create the Endeavour: Tracer Pack — a DLC operative inspired by the SAS with authentic details at its core.
100% of the net proceeds from the DLC go to Call of Duty: Endowment, a non-profit organisation that aims to get unemployed military veterans back in work.
How did the partnership come together? And what real-world gear would you need to survive a real-world black ops mission? Read on to find out.
How do you find the depiction of warfare in the Call of Duty games and Black Ops 6? Is it accurate?
Louis Tinsley: It’s super accurate. It's dramatised, some of the movements are kind of over accentuated. Some of the movements you do in real life as an operator, you're quite heavily exposed. Some of the ways that you can now move around corners and things like that, which is quite slow and methodical in real life, you can see speeded up in the game. But some of the new stuff like Omnimovement and using somebody as a human shield is super cool.
The way that the characters are depicted with the way that they dress, any of the military operators, and especially our pack, we've made sure that it's super accurate to how it should be and how it was back in the 1990s, the era the game is set in.
Anthony ‘Staz’ Stazicker: Our being involved helped guide the pack in terms of the operator skin. Kudos to Call of Duty, putting that much time, energy and effort into the authenticity of not just the game as a whole, but for this individual skin.
We’re the first pack online, and it's the first online Operator skin that's available that depicts a UK Special Forces operator, and we're super proud of that. We've been very, very meticulous in terms of all the details, from weapon systems to cases to the clothing, to the weapon charms and everything else in between.
Even the kind of nuances with some of the terminologies that have been used, ‘Love many, trust few’, etcetera, etcetera. It’s real and close to home in that respect.
Jason Fox: Louis touched on Omnimovement and everything that they've put around that. But the thing that is key to realism in the game is you've got to focus on your movement; where you're moving from and to, where the other team members are, how you work within the team.
Then there's the communications during multiplayer stuff, and that's all key stuff to being a soldier on the ground. So that's what really brings realism, it brings it properly to life.
Was it a collaborative process between you and the game design team when it came to putting the final pack together? Do you give them an idea, or do they come to you and you guide them?
Anthony ‘Staz’ Stazicker: It was a fairly long process, around about six months [and] very, very collaborative. They would always listen to feedback, and we were quite particular on some of the pieces. For the most part, everything that we suggested has come to fruition in the pack. So yeah [they were] very collaborative with the output.
Jason Fox: The skin is made up of actual ThruDark product as well. The stuff that the Operator is wearing, it exists. You can buy it for real, it's not made-up stuff. This is actual functional kit that you can buy, take and use out on the hills, or whatever it is you do.
Louis Tinsley: Treyarch actually asked us to send them the physical product so that they could scan it into the game. So, I mean, that was super for us to be able to see our product that we sell commercially actually being used for the in game character.
Anthony ‘Staz’ Stazicker: Even the colors as well, matching it to our beret, the Special Forces green beret that the commandos use. It’s really cool.
Some players are suggesting that the skin might even be too good, from a camouflage perspective — it’s all black! You can hardly see the Operative in dark scenes!
Louis Tinsley: It wasn't necessarily engineered that way! Lots of what we do is blackout, so it's a hard push for us to change any colour usually. So naturally, just made the Operator skin the way that it should be, as it's based on that 1990s SAS style Black Ops role. So yeah,
Anthony ‘Staz’ Stazicker: That Black Ops role was the domestic counter terrorism, which we held the remit for, and that was part of the job of being Special Forces and Special Boat Service in particular. We actually spoke to a friend of ours, an ex colleague, who was the regimental Sergeant Major of the unit who served during that time to ensure it's got real authenticity.
If you were being dropped into a Black Ops-style covert military operation today, what five bits of kit would you bring with you in order to survive?
Anthony ‘Staz’ Stazicker: I’d need a gun! Start with a weapon system, surely! Yeah, weapon system, AirPods so I don’t have to listen to Foxy all the time…
Jason Fox: Camelback — stay hydrated. It's very important.
Anthony ‘Staz’ Stazicker: Good footwear, good boots, a mobile phone… and a balaclava.
Louis Tinsley: “Carry a knife, save a life” is one of those key quotes. So I definitely have a knife and a gun. You've got to have that. A mobile phone system is going to be particularly handy. And maybe I would take a tourniquet, just in case — I'm from a medic background. So probably, if somebody does get shot, or, I get shot, we’re prepared.
Anthony ‘Staz’ Stazicker: Foxy’s wallet as well!
Jason Fox: Outrageous. I'll take an explosive charge, being a Demolitionist, or actually, I could actually add in there a dog. The dog handlers were pretty useful. But they were a lot of admin. An explosive dog then!
Louis Tinsley: I mean, drones are like in modern warfare now — like, literally in use regularly in warfare. I mean, what? It’s been seven years since I personally served, but drones have come such a long way since. And I think that the utilisation of those is imperative to warfare and modern warfare as we move forward.
Anthony ‘Staz’ Stazicker: I just saw Elon Musk's released his new robots, so I'd be trying to get involved with one of his robots and kind of armour it up. That’s going full Terminator!
Would you fight alongside a robot?
Jason Fox: I fought amongst a few sorta-robots!
Louis Tinsley: It’s likely to be the case. I think the way that modern warfare is going, that human involvement would be reduced to some degree.
Jason Fox: If it does happen, which I think it will,I think the unit that employs those robots needs to have a secret ‘duress' word that they can say and it just shuts down, in case it goes ballistic. And with a human you can't have that — If a human decides he's fucking gone mad there’s little you can do. But if a robot malfunctions, short circuits, is hacked, you’d need that.
Anthony ‘Staz’ Stazicker: But that’s just the advocacy of humans over hardware. I don't think it'll ever sort of pass unless it's robot fighting robots, which technically does happen from a cyber security perspective. But actual physical robots with guns in hand? Who knows — maybe we’re surplus to requirement.