Zombies is back with Call of Duty: Black Ops 7, which launches on November 14. I got a hands-on preview of the game at the Call of Duty Next event in Las Vegas this week and then asked Treyarch’s leaders how they approached the design this year.
Zombies has become a must-have in Call of Duty’s annual releases, and this year it returns on to round-based combat. You can team up with a crew of four total and play co-op, surviving increasing hordes of Zombies in a single arena or traveling across as many as eight locations via a combat truck dubbed Ol’ Tessie.
One of the things that could get more people to play Zombies is cross-progression when it comes to leveling up. Since the game is built on a single game engine, now players can earn Prestige points and level up their weapons across all of the parts of the game, like Zombies, multiplayer, single-player/co-op campaign and Warzone.
The game features reimagined version of the original crew and characters from Call of Duty: Black Ops 6.
There will be new modes like Survival and Curse. The round-based launch map is called the Ashes of Damnation, and players will have to drive the Ol’ Tessie vehicle that can plow through zombies as they go through the fog zones in between the arenas within the larger map. Tessie has a new Wonder Weapon: Necrofluid Gauntlet (not playable at launch). Tessie is upgradable, repairable and aided by T.E.D.D.
Players will be able to fight on a farm and reach round 999 in the beta. There’s also two new maps and a round-based map in Season One. The Ashes of Damnation is a massive map with eight or so parts to it, each separated by fog. The dedicated crew includes Maya, Weaver, Carver and Grey. You can meet alternative versions of the OG crew: Richtofen, Nikolai, Takeo and Dempsey.
Perks include Perk-a-Cola: Wisp Team; ammo mode Fire Works; Field Upgrade: Toxic Growth; 66 new Augments to unlock at launch out of 192 total. GobbleGums returns from Black Ops 3, where you build packs of five, store up to three on you and activate them at any time. You can pre-order digitally and log into Call of Duty by the end of beta and receive a Monster GobbleGum pack in Black Ops 6.
At Call of Duty Next, I did an interview with Kevin Drew, design director for Call of Duty Zombies, and Steve Biachi, lead game designer at Treyarch.
You can see my first round of four-player co-op Zombies in the video below.
Here’s an edited transcript of our interview.
GamesBeat: How did you approach Zombies for this iteration?
Kevin Drew: For this one, there were a couple things. We wanted to continue to push the envelope and get us closer to what people would probably say is the golden era of Zombies in regards to creativity. We wanted the maps in this game to be really out there, to bring back the feeling where you don’t know what to expect next. Hopefully Ashes of the Damned starts with that.
On the gameplay side, just the ways to play. Widening that net and making sure that there’s something for everyone. Black Ops 6 added directed mode, which I think is great for new players. This game is more focused on, we want to deliver a next-level experience for our hardcore audience and give them a mode that has lots of layers and discover. That should hopefully give them plenty of stuff to play.
Steve Bianchi: There are also survival maps. If you want to jump in and just have a really tight experience, shoot some zombies, have fun, we have that covered for you as well. In general, the maps take inspiration from Transit. How do we reimagine that in the new tools and engine and systems we have? Really pushing the envelope with Zombies is what we’re going after this year.
GamesBeat: Do the areas within the map get harder? Once we got to the farm, it seemed like it was a lot more difficult.
Drew: The mode is inherently–the rounds go up and it gets harder. What’s different about this map, it’s a bit more replayable. You get your own version every time based on how you navigate that.
Bianchi: It’s a different experience than just going down a different hallway. You’re going to a totally different area of the map. Directed mode, if you’ve played that in Black Ops 6, the rounds are capped. We’re guiding you along the whole way. In that sense it only really gets harder than round 15. We want you to get through the experience and the quests. That’s a good way to ease yourself into that. The rounds keep repeating until you do a specific objective, so it doesn’t get harder. You progress on your own.
GamesBeat: I equipped an LMG since I figured that would be a pretty good weapon, with the giant magazine. It worked well, but I found that if I didn’t hit them in the head–they were pretty spongy. They took a lot of bullets. I had to be more careful and look for more headshots. What do you want the players to think about as they approach combat?
Drew: Because global progression is in Zombies, we want to make sure that every weapon has a valid path. But you have to upkeep the guns. A big part of that is you’re going to pack-a-punch it. You’re going to have to increase the rarity if you want to keep your starting weapon. We’re actively encouraging you to engage with the world in this game and find other weapons. We want you to use wall buys. We want you to use the mystery box. It’s a game about out-stepping the rounds. If you start to fall behind–that’s the mode. How do I do better next time? How do I keep up?
Bianchi: You’ll have to pack-a-punch the vehicle. Ultimately the pack-a-punch quest that was guiding you through there to Ashwood will culminate in upgrading the vehicle with the pack-a-punch on there. That’s crucial to have once you get to a certain round.
GamesBeat: Going into it blindly on my side–it felt like I needed to know more about how to upgrade. There’s about a half-dozen things you can go to in that short time, but you can’t go to all of them. You have to know what you should go to.
Drew: We do have a training course that comes out at launch this time. It was in season one in Black Ops 6. We missed the boat there. It takes place in the farm and it teaches you all the mechanics that you need to know. Survival is a good spot to go from there. It’s a self-contained experience. You don’t have to go anywhere. You just stay in the farm and you have everything you need.
Bianchi: The pack-a-punch is just a door, by the way. When you do the training course it’s in the farm. It’s going to show you, hey, this is pack-a-punch. What does it do? It walks you through everything. It’s very low stakes. You can’t die during the training. Then you boot up survival and you already know the fundamentals of the map and where those things are. It’s a good way to get the basics going. Then you maybe want to jump in and do the full round-based experience map in Ashes of the Damned, with the vehicle incorporated.
GamesBeat: With Tessie, then, what are you trying to do that’s entertaining for the player? You can’t actually kill some of the zombies you’re shooting at, right?
Drew: In the fog, yeah. We wanted to make sure there was a constant pressure being on those roads. We did a lot of iteration there. Ultimately we want this to be a terrifying place. That means we have to break the normal mold of Zombies. It’s about getting from point A to point B. But hopefully Tessie is just inherently fun. I find it to be. You don’t have to know much to be able to drive around in the locations and run over zombies.
Bianchi: It bonds people. You jump into a random lobby with people and you’re going to work together to get the vehicle jumped. Get with me, help protect it, let’s get to the next location. It gets the team working together. That’s the main thing with Zombies, to me. I love the community, jumping in with other people and playing together. Reviving other people. Helping them along the way.
GamesBeat: Is it just a road through the fog, or is it actually an area with fog?
Drew: They’re roads. You can run. You can get out of the vehicle. It’s just very challenging. There will absolutely be things to discover there that will require more advanced understanding of the level.
Bianchi: You can see–if you went through the lost cabins section, you can go in those cabins and explore. There will be things that you need to do as you go through there if you do the main quest. But in the basic sense of RBZ, especially early on when you’re not prepared to go through there, you want to just get through there. Run and make it. It’s like no man’s land.
GamesBeat: It’s part of the experience, then. It’s not just transportation.
Bianchi: Exactly. It’s part of the atmosphere of the level, that these are really dangerous places to go through, so you can’t mess around when you go through there. But we also have jump pads. Once you get the map unlocked, the power on for those–you can avoid those if you pay some essence and just get to the next location if you want to go that way.
GamesBeat: How do you encounter the bear? What do you have to do?
Drew: It starts with just getting to–I think round 15 is when it can start showing up. It’s just that escalation of difficulty. It’s a menace. It’s not easy to deal with.
GamesBeat: Can it show up anywhere?
Bianchi: Yes. Even if you jump away, they’ll come for you. They’ll chase you down. That AI is tough. It’s designed with the vehicle in mind. Even if I have that truck, I can’t just smash through. It can hold you up and help destroy the truck, just like the ravagers. They can jump up on it and rip it apart. That requires teamwork, fighting these guys and taking them down. It changes up the pace of the gameplay. It’s scary. You’re in these forests and this zombie bear is chasing you. It’s a lot of fun. It’s compelling. You hear the sound of that and think, “Oh, no.”
I don’t know if you got the chance to do the exfil. You see those phone booths in all the areas? This time you’ll hear a ringing at the phone when it’s exfil round. You can answer the call. Whoever wants to join in on it, they can, or you can just solo exfil and leave everybody else behind. When you opt into that, you’ll be locked into a smaller arena there. The Zursa is going to come for you to fight you. It’s a do or die moment. When you take him out, that’ll open up the portal to get you to the safe zone.
Drew: I wanted to go back to the previous question about Tessie and the experience of the vehicle. We spent a lot of time thinking about–we wanted to make sure bringing a vehicle into round-based felt like it fit. It wasn’t just–we could have easily taken vehicles from Warzone. They feel disposable there. They’re not as valuable. We wanted this to feel essential to the mode. Also, why we have roads and not just an open map is because in round-based, it’s very much about that feeling of claustrophobia. Bringing in the spaces to make them feel a bit more crafted. We wanted the whole level to feel like a very crafted experience for round-based.
GamesBeat: There was one part where we were fighting and all four of us got inside the big barn. We stayed there and shot at anything coming in. That worked for a while, but not forever.
Bianchi: Eventually you get overrun or your guns aren’t powerful enough.
Drew: It’s the nature of the mode, yeah.
Bianchi: I hope you saw the saw-blade trap. That’s one of my favorite traps of all time. It’s right outside the barn. You get the power on and it plays this weird creepy music that lures the zombies. It’s really good if you need a breather to revive somebody.
GamesBeat: I was probably too panicked to see it this time. There’s an interesting conversation to have about designing for somebody that’s just running around scared, mowing down zombies, and the people that go for Easter eggs and things like that. How do you go about designing for different kinds of players?
Bianchi: The survival map is really for that experience. I just want to have fun, jump in there and hold out. I want to just get to a higher round. I don’t have to go through the experience of unlocking the car and do all that. I just want to have that core experience. But Call of Duty is all about the variety of gameplay, all the content we have. I want to push myself. Hey, let’s try to get to pack-a-punch now. Directed mode is out now, I can’t wait to try that and get more experience. Having tons of content for people, whatever they’re looking for in the game.
GamesBeat: With all of these universal systems in place now for progression, how does that affect what you do? Now that you’re dealing with imported Warzone guns, for example, rather than just designing everything yourself.
Drew: We build around the era’s guns, historically. What’s nice about the progression system is it gives you more reasons to try out the other modes. Back to your question about what happens if I’m a player who just shoots zombies until they die–it’s like Groundhog Day. That’s fine, if I’m having fun and what motivates me to play is I’m unlocking camos or leveling up or ranking up in career. But if I’m on the fifth or sixth match and I think about how I might get to round 12–you start to think more about the environment. At its core it’s just fun to shoot things in our engine, but with this mode, you start to think about what you might think differently each time.
Bianchi: There’s a fun, engaging basic gameplay loop, but we can add all these extra elements. All these augments for your perks, all these extra decisions you can make as a player.
Drew: Those things hopefully just–maybe some players will play a few times and they’re good. But those extra layers, I think, motivate a lot of players to continue to come back.
GamesBeat: It’s not wasted time anymore.
Bianchi: Exactly. People love to unlock and grind things.
Drew: That’s the current era of gaming. Everyone wants their time to matter.
GamesBeat: It seems like you discovered that there was a layer of friction there. When you make it go away, you may get people to put more time in. It’ll be interesting to see if the amount of time played on Zombies goes up.
Bianchi: Liberty Falls is a really super popular map that came out. We had Terminus at launch and the Liberty. We saw big engagement with a map that’s very accessible. That’s why we have survival maps coming back for this. We’re removing those barriers and training people and giving them that opportunity to get their feet wet in the mode, or just enjoy that experience in a pure sense. It’s a lot more like playing the original World at War map, where you’re locked in the little bunker.
Drew: That’s truly all you need to do. Shoot zombies.
GamesBeat: Are there any surprises that you can hint at? Things players are going to run into in the higher levels?
Bianchi: There are so many surprises. You want that spoiled? Really?
Drew: I think people are going to have a lot of fun with Cursed once they find it. If you’re the type of player who’s looking to find secrets, there are lots more secrets to find in that mode.
Bianchi: Even after you’ve completed what you think is on the map–but wait, there’s more!
Drew: Finding the secrets in the base, standard mode is just the tip of the iceberg now.
Bianchi: The relics in Cursed are also super cool, because they’re things that are historic to the mode that you find. That’s really cool. Long-time fans will appreciate it.
GamesBeat: Was Zombies coming in hot in some way? This is almost the last part of Black Ops 7 that’s been revealed.
Drew: No, we were ready. We did a brief in August. We were showing Zombies as well. We usually hold back on Zombies. It’s just the order of operations. We have definitely been working on this map for a long time. We’re proud to show the world.
Disclosure: Activision paid my way to Las Vegas for Call of Duty Next.