Black Ops 6 bosses at maker Treyarch said the team was delighted with the way the shooter game’s fanbase took to the revamped zombies horde mode
Call of Duty bosses reckon a return to round-based zombies shootathons has ‘lit a fire’ among fans and given the game a ‘renewed energy’.
Corky Lehmkuhl, a studio creative director at Treyarch, which made Call of Duty: Black Ops 6, said the team was delighted with the way the shooter game’s fanbase took to the revamped zombies horde mode.
The mode is where gamers face increasingly difficult waves of zombies, earning points to unlock new areas, upgrade weapons, and buy perks to survive.
It was a core part of the gameplay in older iterations of the franchise before being given new life in the current annual instalment.
Corky said: “Zombies has always had a passionate community, but the return to round-based maps with Black Ops 6 really lit a fire.
“The response was super positive at launch, and both longtime fans and new players have jumped in at a huge scale.
“You can feel the renewed energy in the mode’s momentum, and it’s been great to see so many players rediscovering what they loved about Zombies.”
Senior writer Tony Bedard said a lot of work is put into making sure the zombies gameplay supports the imaginative storylines within the sub-mode of the wider CoD experience.
He told the Daily Star: “Storytelling in Zombies is its own beast, and it takes place in different ways, both inside and outside the game.
“Our first challenge is to make sure the gameplay can support the narrative.
“As players gear up, search through the map, and start completing quest steps, they need to know when they’re doing things right, or when they fall short and need to try again.
“The challenge is that we don’t want to ‘hold their hand,’ but allow them to explore and find solutions for themselves.
“We also deliver story through ‘Intel’ like audiologs, documents, and artifacts that flesh out the map’s history and characters’ backstories.
“But unlike a movie where the audience passively receives everything they need to know, Zombies is a mode where players have to connect the dots for themselves.
“The Zombies community grew online around this need to share theories and discoveries, and we love to foster speculation. As one content creator out there put it succinctly: ‘Don’t give us answers, give us questions’.
While you can certainly play the game like a headless chicken and have a lot of fun just killing zombies and trying to stay alive for as long as possible, once you start unlocking quest steps and discovering Easter eggs, you begin to see just how deep and layered an experience this is.”
He said the new Directed Mode has helped newer gamers to flesh out the storyline when they need a bit of guidance.
It’s a feature that provides waypoints uses waypoints and written instructions to show players what to do next, making it easier to follow the main tale.
“Directed Mode has done a great job of opening the eyes of more casual players to how much hidden content and story there is in a Zombies map,” he said.
“When we design a map, we certainly try to appeal to veteran players who know all the ins and outs of the mode, but there’s a much larger group of players who don’t know these things and now have a chance to play through a quest to its ultimate conclusion without having to hunt for all these secrets online.
“This ends up drawing more people into the community once they begin to learn how to get from one quest step to the next for themselves.
“The Directed Mode data has proven a sizeable increase in Main Quest completions compared to previous games, which means more players are experiencing the story we’re telling through these quests for the first time, so we know we’re on the right track.
“We also delay the release of Directed Mode for each new map to give purists a chance to beat the quest unassisted, with an extra reward for doing so.
“It’s been great to hear from Zombies players who’ve told us Directed Mode opened up a whole new dimension for them in a game they already loved.”
Black Ops 6 is available now on PS5 and Xbox Series X and its successor,Black Ops 7, is due for release later this year.
