News - Warzone 2 Zombies Season 1 Dark Aether Map Gameplay. New Exclusive Details
This is DK Dynamite, and tonight we're going to be talking about the new season 1 gameplay for MW3, zombies. And also as a reminder, we have plenty of brand new coverage going up over on Detonated, expanding on all the content you're seeing here on the channel, just in the form of articles, websites, and tweets every single hour on Detonated.
On Twitter earlier today, there was a ton of marketing released for season 1 of MW3. I want to thank all of you guys for tuning into my gameplay stream, where we went ahead and completed Act 3: The Boss Fight for MW3.
Huge reveals for season 1 today!
Zombies, then we went ahead and reacted to the new black cell. Gameplay trailer: there was a new battle pass blog post detailing a bunch of the store offerings for our first season, and then there was a surprise trailer also dropped for season one of Zombies.
As a reminder, we'll be live tomorrow morning with the launch and reaction to season 1 of the entire game. We'll be live pretty early in the morning, going through a read of the patch notes, then jumping straight into zombies, followed by some ukan, and Battle Royale. Now, during that briefing, a bunch of new information was learned that was not actually explicitly talked about in the recent blog post for our first season.
No seasonal wipe for mw3 zombies.
So first off, as a huge reminder, there will not be a reset with your act missions or your inventory stash with season 1. I know they did this twice in DMZ, where they just reset your mission progress and your entire inventory. They're not going to be doing that with zombies, and I doubt that they ever will, especially considering it's not a PVE.
Experience, it's only PVE, so once season 1 begins, you're still going to keep all your mission progress, your schematics, your acquisitions, and anything else you might have looted around the environment. Hopefully, that is very clear.
How to play act 4 missions in season 1
But as a big reminder , when it comes to season 1, Act 4 is about to be introduced. Now you don't have to complete acts 1 through 3 to actually hop into act four, which is a bit surprising. I would have expected that they would have wanted you to go ahead and complete the previous acts to access the next one, but I guess it's also cool for those out there that might have gotten the game late or for those that are about to get it for Christmas.
You're not going to miss out on the season 1 update, which includes the Dark Eternal Rifts. Now for those out there wondering how Act 4 is going to work, apparently it is a story mission right out of the gate when you go into a dark ether Rift, but it's unclear how many missions are attached to Act 4.
We're going to learn all of that tomorrow with the full release. For those wondering what happened to that, the Fear of the Dark main quest is going to be added in. I'm a little confused if Fear of the Dark is the name of Act 4. I think that kind of thing would make sense because you're afraid of the dark, and you're going into the dark ether.
That would make sense, or that could just be a main quest that is being saved for a feature update entirely, possibly with season 2 or later.
Main easter egg teaser & mystery icon
I think by now it would have been heard if there was a main quest, but there might be something that they teased, which could imply a main quest is just around the corner, and essentially what that is an icon that we were shown during that crater briefing, which they didn't elaborate on at all, nor did they tease over on social media or in the recent blog post.
It was a devilish-looking icon, and they didn't say much about it. You would think that it represents a giant boss or a huge objective. In the Urhan environment, it's not an icon that we've seen before, so it's unclear if that's an icon referring to a main quest or some other secret that's going to be added to Zstan, which again they have not marketed as of today.
Hardcore dark aether & sigils explained
What's also crazy about the dark ether is that there will be two different versions of it, which again weren't explicitly talked about in any of the recent marketing, so what you want to do is find sigils in the high-threat zone reward rifts around Zstan.
Now sigils can be saved in your stash for future infills, which is really damn important, and I do apologize. In a previous article, I pronounced it seagull. I was on no sleep, so I apologize for mispronouncing that it's sigils, not seagulls, like we saw in Blood of the Dead through that main quest, but then we got a gameplay trailer earlier today for season one of Zombies. I did not expect Trck to post this on their YouTube channel; they haven't posted on their channel in quite some time.
New gameplay trailer breakdown & anaylsis
But you can clearly see that a storm is coming to Ekhan. We can see what looks like a clip of a cinematic cut scene involving Jansen; she might be hearing voices from Samantha; we know she's schizophrenic according to recent Intel and other in-game evidence that we've seen, so that's going to be cool to see if we end up getting a cinematic cut scene at the end of this supposed act four; we see The Ether warm again.
I'm wondering if we'll now have some heavy boss that roams around Urzikstan and the dark ether separate from the giant worm that we see at the end of Act 3. We'll have to wait and see. We also got gameplay of the dark ether blade, which is certainly a modern-day Hell's Retriever that Ricochets off of nearby zombies and will Boomerang.
Back to you, it's unclear if you can actually go ahead and pick up powerups for you, but this is again a form of lethal equipment, not a weapon that you can pack-a-punch. Hopefully, that's clear. We then get new footage of the VR11 in action, right? A new version of the wonder weapon that we saw in Black Ops 1's called The Dead has the ability, of course, to turn zombies into mercenaries.
AI, or could turn mercenary AI into brain-rotted zombies, so it should be a lot more useful than the original version we had in 2011. Dark ether Rifts, though, as you can see, are pretty massive, so once you find those sigils, you'll probably know exactly where to go around the map to access the dark ether, and once you're in the dark ether, you can clearly tell this is Albra Fortress from Almaza.
It's unclear if there'll be a story explanation as to why we're in Almaza when we enter the dark ether; who knows what the explanation is going to be, but either way, reuse assets or not, it's content. I would rather them, you know, release what they're doing now and then save all the resources on newer maps, for, you know, another exclusion zone entirely in MW3, or Black Ops 2024 zombies alt together, we see what looks like a quick aim ability with the ray gun.
