News - My Concerns About Warzone 2i Zombies - Will It Deliver To Hardcore Zombie Players
Intro
Cool, so it's been announced, and there's gameplay for it out there. I'm sure you all have seen it at this point. I have seen it too, and well, today I want to talk just a little bit about it. I will try to give you my thoughts and maybe start a discussion with you all. If that sounds good, feel free to Stay Zombies, right?.
Zombies outbreak recap
C doesn't seem to work without that game mode. Don't get me wrong. I enjoy all aspects of Call of Duty, and for the most part. I'm primarily focused on killing the undead on this channel, but hey, right now. I really like the haunting event in War Zone; it's so much fun. Call of Duty is always evolving, and so is their zombie mode, which started as a round-based mode where survival was the goal but quickly changed into something with obscure Easter egg quests and secrets.
People liked it. People loved it for many years. Maybe they added another game mode like grief or gauntlets, but it's been evolving ever since the beginning, and with Black Ops Cold War, they introduced outbreak, an open-world type of experience where you fought zombies on bigger maps with more freedom than ever.
I'm not sure if I ever mentioned that, but I really liked the outbreak. It was so much fun in World War II. I might like it the most out of all of the DLC updates, if I'm thinking about it. Don't get me wrong. I also very much like the round-based stuff like the Machina or Forsaken, but something about the outbreak was in a way revolutionary, the freedom you had when parachuting across the map running over zombies with a tank while Toto Africa played as an unlocked war track; it was so goofy it was so fun; then Vanguard zombies came around, and of course, of course, their take on objective-based gameplay was just not it.
In my opinion, you can't even compare their unfun with the outbreak since the objective-based progression was the only similarity between them. Now, 2 years later, we are awaiting a new outbreak type mode more similar to the original outbreak from the Cold War on a big war zone map, and from the looks of it, it seems pretty solid, apart from a few things that I will discuss in a moment.
Let me say that I don't mind using the same maps from multiplayer in zombies; that wasn't an issue in Cold War, and it isn't now, at least for me. I would hope that the environment gets a zombie flare similar to the Haunting event in War Zone, which is making the map darker and testing demonic or Halloween-type aesthetics. Other than that, we will get our Cold War perk cans back with some slight changes, like PhD Flopper replacing PhD Slider, which is fantastic to hear by the way, and the Wonder Weapon also looks really fun to use, and I can't wait to grind for the next dark EA.
Problems in modern warfare 3 zombies
Camo. However, there are also parts that stand out as major problems for me personally.
First things first, Modern Warfare 3 seems to be the most unfriendly solo experience ever, worse than World War II zombies, to be honest. It almost demands you have a group of three people from the start with the idea in mind to join another trio team, which is completely stupid if you ask me. I've been here a long time now.
I know how people play. I play with friends too sometimes, and I completely understand that C is a multiplayer game. However, I know that the most hardcore zombie players are playing solo. They might have started playing since World War II; they might have started playing with friends that locked out in 2015 and never came back online.
They might prefer to play simply without the pressure of carrying a whole team. Solo zombie players exist, and I would imagine that they are the majority of hardcore zombie players, not the majority of zombie players in general, because that will change with the integration of the War Zone player base into this one.
My point is that if you play solo, you will handicap yourself from the start because your damage output seems to be really off. From the gameplay I've seen, it takes a lot of bullets to manage crowd control, so even a full team might struggle if they don't coordinate. So how are you going to survive Solo in an innermost outbreak region with tons of strong zombies?
That's what I'm wondering. Sure, you could always join a random team; that's possible, but that's not what I would want as a solo player. If you want to have the freedom that comes with starting a private game, if 24 other players are all dropping on the same map, it might be chaos. It might be fun, but it also might be annoying.
Someone starting objectives alone only to come down across the map, someone stealing your loot box or EA tool in front of your eyes, someone picking up a mission item that you needed as part of a mission yourself—that's all going to happen, and it's going to be annoying for you. And it's forcible gameplay behavior; even if you play with a team, you know there is a chance that someone else from another team comes across to steal your stuff.
But hey, at least it's not pppp, because if that were also the case, the traditional zombie player would not even touch this mode, and I can't blame them. I tried DMC, and it stinks. You might just be running around minding your own business, but instead you will get chased and killed. So the solo, unfriendly gameplay loop is really worrying me already.
The other huge red flag is the play time being limited to 1 hour. This just goes back to what I said earlier. Let players play the way they want to play; give them the freedom to do stuff on their own. If they want to play it nice and slow for a few hours, let them chill. Wars outbreak was perfectly letting players progress on their own terms; you could explore every square centimeter before you WRA to the next region, but now having a 1 hour maximum play time seems really out of place.
Maybe it's so that the players don't abuse battle pass XP. But even then, there's got to be a better way to do this instead of punishing the player here, but yeah, for hardcore zombie players, this will be an actual deal-breaker since there's no proper way of doing high rounds.
Conclusion
Nowadays, Modern Warfare 3's idea is good: some faithful outbreak 2.0 with some new and old mechanics.
I like it, but their execution and gameplay loop are what's stopping me from being sold. If those two issues could be changed, I would be sitting here counting the days until it releases, but here we are. Don't get me wrong. I will still try it out, but I'm more cautiously optimistic about it right now.
The mode has the potential to do great things if they update it, add more perks and weapons, and maybe maps like I destroyed vians with zombies or Alcat Island will be huge. I have no doubt about that, but we just have to kind of wait and see. If there's one thing I've learned about cord games over the years, it's that the launch is the most important time.
