There are good Call of Duty maps, there are forgettable Call of Duty maps, there are bad Call of Duty maps, and then there's Babylon. Set in a dusty corner of a beleaguered Iraq in 1991, Babylon is a Black Ops 6 map I find so unpleasant that it takes all my will not to insta-quit lobbies that vote for it.
I'm not alone in my Babylon hate, but it'd be wrong to suggest it's the most hated map in Black Ops 6. There's no consensus so far: My coworker Jake Tucker hates Scud with all his being, a map that I like despite obvious annoyances, and my lobbies are avoiding Red Card like the plague. To me, Babylon is the worst map in a pool of pretty underwhelming battlegrounds in Black Ops 6. I give Treyarch high marks for the theming of its 6v6 maps this year—Red Card's soccer pitch, Skyline's rooftop hotel, and Lowtown's Venice-like canal networks look fantastic—but their layouts succumb to the worst tendencies of Activision map design: cramped quarters, exploitable sightlines, terrible spawns, and unimaginative floor plans.
Babylon is every mapmaking sin rolled up into one convenient target. Because I prefer to hate specifically, I jotted down some notes about Babylon:
It's a boring square
I don't hate that Babylon is a square—the history of multiplayer shooters is built on simple shapes—I hate that it's a boring square. There's a square on the outside and a square on the inside. On the left are some walls, to the north is a raised platform, and in the middle is also raised but otherwise featureless.
These arches suck
The coolest-looking architectural feature of Babylon, the pair of arched buildings on either spawn, is also a total nightmare to actually exist near. If you spawn on the north arches, literally every available exit can be watched by snipers across the map. If you're running past them to go elsewhere, enemies that have no business spawning so close to you will emerge from the arches and ruin your streak. The arches themselves are perfect target practice for grenade throwing—toss anything lethal through these standing hoops and you'll probably kill someone. I hate looking at this area.
What even is this part
The west quadrant of Babylon is a damn mess. It's the section of the map fully enclosed by walls, but we all know that "fully enclosed" by Babylon standards still means you can be shot from about 37 doors and windows. I don't understand how Treyarch envisions players making tactical use of the sniper nest (marked by the yellow plywood). Its position is way too exposed to the north for anyone to feel safe up there for more than three seconds, so predictably, nobody uses it. What's left is a bottleneck that connects the two hottest kill zones on the map (the center and north platform), which is fine in TDM but becomes a miserable death pit when it's the contested zone in Hardpoint. Grenades fly in and have nowhere to go.
Babylon's best vantage point can barely see anything
In general, I wish Treyarch would play with verticality more. This is the closest thing to a strategic vantage point in Babylon, and it kinda sucks. Its greatest function is to catch players off guard when they hurry too fast around the northeast corner and lock down the alleyway of death (touched on above), which is pretty weak stuff for what should be prized territory. Asymmetrical map design hasn't really been a feature of CoD since it got obsessed with "three lane" blueprints years ago, and this boring platform is a common consequence of refusing to get weird.
The center might as well not be there
Babylon has this raised centerpiece—a roundabout from which you can fast travel to anywhere on the map—and players actively avoid it. Why? Any number of reasons:
- There's no cover, so you're immediately exposed from four directions the millisecond you hit the top of those stairs
- Grenades are constantly getting lobbed in there
- Other than flanking, why bother? You can't even see that much from the top
- It's a square with a slightly higher square in the middle
Imagine if the center of Babylon was a proper stronghold. I see this blank space and picture a thousand interesting map features that could've gone here: a treehouse of cover to be sieged, a tower with angles on all four corners of the map, like six more pieces of cover—anything really.
If Babylon were a Halo map, players would fight over this space because it's where the rocket launcher would spawn. But because it's just a blank square, nobody cares. The only redeemable quality of Babylon is that it's small, making it a desirable place to grind mastery camos and get the most out of double XP.
