When Black Ops 4 Zombies concluded with Tag Der Toten, many questions arose about the future of the cult-followed mode. What has followed has been a bit of a rollercoaster ride, as Zombies tries to find its footing in the “Modern” Call of Duty landscape. One thing is for sure, though. The undead mode just will not die!
The first game in the new era of Zombies, Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War, overhauled many systems and mechanics to give Zombies a “familiar but fresh” feel. All updates for the game were free, and Treyarch released the largest amount of post-launch modes it had ever created for Zombies, including the hotly contested Outbreak. While the open-world mode wasn’t loved by everyone, Cold War support ended with Outbreak in a great state, featuring multiple quests, an abundance of objectives and activities, and a healthy number of locations to battle Zombies and Dark Aether denizens. This complemented the four round-based maps released throughout Cold War, delivering a solid new take on Zombies, with the potential to address some of the feedback from fans. This feedback mainly pertained to difficulty, the absence of a crew of four characters, and the reduced number of round-based maps compared to previous instalments.
While Vanguard Zombies had some interesting story implications and a few neat gameplay ideas, the reception to it was poor. The development seemed extremely tumultuous, with rumours of a lower budget and a minuscule amount of development time compared to what Treyarch is used to for Zombies. This was unfortunate, as it killed a lot of the momentum that had been built up during Cold War. Nevertheless, Treyarch went back to the lab and started working on the “next thing”, as Zombies was put to rest during Modern Warfare II. The “next thing” has turned out to be Modern Warfare III Zombies!
From what is known so far, this mode will be a hybrid of Modern Warfare 2’s DMZ mode and Treyarch Zombies. It’s a departure in some respects from the beloved mode, but an interesting one that will hopefully engage fans while Treyarch works on more traditional Zombies for its next main development title (likely COD 2024, though we know better than to say anything is a certainty when it comes to COD!).
Before Call of Duty NEXT reveals the mode on October 5th, we thought we’d throw some last minute hopes and dreams into the Dark Aether, with a slight hint of speculation in the mix too.
An Engaging and Replayable Gameplay Loop
Throughout all the different iterations of Zombies, the mode has always ultimately been about survival. Even during a main quest, you need to stay alive or you won’t be able to complete it. Staying on top of weapons, upgrades, perks, and equipment: it’s all to ensure you can handle the horde. Using a DMZ framework for Zombies will also mean that the exfil mechanic that first appeared in Cold War will have a lot more meaning. After completing all the upgrades, the only bonus you’d get for exfiltrating was an XP bonus. In this mode, you’ll need to make a decision about what you want to extract, and the tension when exfiltrating will be much higher if you have a valuable item that you’re trying to get out of the contamination zone safely.
Thankfully, with PvP already confirmed NOT to be a feature, it will allow Treyarch to balance the AI, loot, game economy, and rewards without needing to worry about the additional factor of PvP combat. There also will not be any players boosting or farming, and you will not come across a team of 6 players ready to gun you down in a split second. Instead, squads are all focused on killing the undead and surviving until exfil.
Well Balanced Difficulty
The danger of an extraction mode — where you are able to use some weapons and items in multiple games — is that low difficulty will not only render much of the mode’s economy useless, but it will also kill the motivation of many players as they’ll feel they’ve “seen it all” after just a few games.
We know that there’s a Ray Gun weapon crate of some sort that can be extracted. If obtaining and extracting the Ray Gun is an easy task, players will be able to start almost every game with one (assuming the crate simply enables the use of a Ray Gun in the next deployment, which may not be how it works, but for argument’s sake, we’ll assume it is!). There is a delicate balance to be found when it comes to having a fun and engaging mode that offers a challenge while also rewarding players and allowing them to extract weapons, items, and equipment.
The hope here is that Treyarch chooses to over-tune the difficulty at launch, rather than under-tune it. It would be better to have a mode that is too difficult for most players, rather than having a super easy mode where everyone is loaded up with tons of weapons and items in reserve and can then rush through the mode without giving it much thought. Cold War (and even Vanguard, to its credit) featured many balance updates that kept Zombies healthy, so there’s no fear about the game launching and not being adjusted if required. Ideally, the Zombies Team has already arrived at the perfect level of difficulty, but if they still aren’t sure, hopefully they choose to overshoot and take it from there.
An Accessible Story with Deep Lore for Diehards
For lore junkies like us, Cold War was a godsend. Roughly every month, a bunch of new intel would arrive to be discovered and collected. This intel could be viewed outside of matches, which made piecing the story together a lot more enjoyable than previous Zombies experiences where a player had to leave a crawler to hear hidden radios. DMZ had a similar intel system, so it looks promising that this feature will return in Modern Warfare III. It was sorely missed in Vanguard Zombies. Gathering intel will be a more involved process in MWIII too, as you’ll likely need to successfully extract the documents to discover the secrets they hold.
While the intel system was a great addition to Zombies for many players, some disliked having to collect all the intel and missed important story threads. In this regard, Cold War felt like a callback to the older form of Zombies storytelling, but there are clearly players out there who prefer the more cinematic moments in Black Ops 3 and 4.
To try and get more players invested in the story, Treyarch can hopefully double down on the idea of frequent intel updates, but also have more scripted events and cinematics to put some more meat on the story. The small amount of information released about MW3Z during the reveal noted that completing missions will lead to cinematics, so it certainly sounds like it’s a bigger priority to have engaging story moments this time round.
With Modern Warfare now being the third era touched by the Dark Aether, it’ll be interesting to see where Treyarch plans to go from here. With its next mainline title on the horizon—presumably with more traditional Zombies experiences—there will likely be a lot of story being held back. If the past is anything to go by, a few small detours never hurt anybody.
Post Launch Support with a Clear Plan for the Future
As mentioned before, Treyarch has had mixed results in adapting Zombies to fit within Activision’s rigid live service model for Call of Duty. It simply isn’t feasible to pump out a new round-based map every season. While many clamour for the days of old, when Zombies was included in the four DLC packs spaced out across a year, we can’t imagine any of these players would be happy to see a seasonal roadmap with no Zombies on it due to the next map being two months away.
Outbreak was a good step towards having a mode that could constantly be updated in between round-based maps. The cadence wasn’t perfect, with a few updates feeling a bit slimmer than others, but it was a promising start. Hopefully, MW3Z can take what Treyarch learned from Outbreak and push it forward. Until we fully understand how the mode operates though, we won’t know the nature of the updates we’ll receive or their frequency.
There’s a slight concern that MW3Z might impact Treyarch’s next mainline title. Not being privy to Treyarch’s schedule, we can’t really comment on that except by hoping that the studio has a good plan for the future and is executing on it. The little we do know, based on a Bloomberg report regarding Treyarch’s next game, is that as early as February 2022, Treyarch was working on something for 2023. This was described as a “free-to-play title” at the time, but it likely became what is now known as Modern Warfare 3 Zombies. It doesn’t seem like the mode was rushed together at the last minute, which should give players a bit of relief when it comes to both MW3Z and COD 2024. The Zombies team is no doubt working as hard as they can, but it doesn’t look like the wheels are falling off the Tranzit bus quite yet!
Modern Warfare 3 Zombies will no doubt have critics from the start. Some are already sowing the seeds of discontent before the full reveal has even taken place. Having followed the mode since World at War, we’re more than happy for Treyarch to try some new things with it. We’ll always want more round-based maps, but why not get a little bit weird and experimental while those maps are cooking in the oven? We trust Treyarch with this one, and look forward to the reveal at Call of Duty: NEXT.