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If the new Battle Royale mode of Call of Duty is available, then the Zombies experience is hardcore. You must love to die constantly to become good at Zombies, as I learned during certain game sessions during an Activision event. And this time, Activision's Treyarch studio did everything they could to bring a new Zombies experience to Call of Duty: Black Ops 4, which debuts today.
Treyarch did everything in his power to invite novice zombie players. He offers three experiences – IX, Voyage of Despair and Blood of the Dead – and IX's address to beginners. IX takes place in ancient Rome, Blood of the Dead revisits the Alcatraz prison and Voyage of Despair takes place on the Titanic. A tutorial and a solo mode allow you to play with robots.
But Treyarch has also enamelled the levels of the Zombies with new types of weapons and Easter eggs that appeal to most Zombies. And he raised the previous ceiling of 255 on the towers. You can now play 1,024 rounds in all. In Travel of the Damned, many tight spaces prevent all your cooperative players from staying alive.
I spoke to Jason Blundell, director of Zombies and executive producer of Treyarch, about efforts to triple the number of Zombies. He noted that the script of all Zombie stories, once printed on paper, was far superior to previous scripts for one-player campaigns.
Here is a transcript of our interview.
Above: Jason Blundell is director of Zombies and executive producer of Call of Duty: Black Ops 4.
Image credit: Dean Takahashi
GamesBeat: What was your position on zombies this time?
Jason Blundell: I am director of Zombies and, for my sins, I am also executive producer.
GamesBeat: Have you been working on this for three years?
Blundell: I have been working at Treyarch for 15 years and it is a three year project.
GamesBeat: How would you say you approached these zombies early?
Blundell: This time, it really comes from the mentality of the whole project, which is one of the most socially connected, customizable and deepest games. Now it sounds like a slogan, but that's where we left. All decisions concerning all aspects of the game have been guided by this objective.
Take the example of zombies, when I say that it is the most social, obviously the number of cards, the number of stories, the amount of emerging behaviors that may arise from these different scenarios. When I say the most personalized, the idea that you can customize your character, choose your loads and your equipment. Even the meta systems, which we will integrate, whether or not we have Black Ops Pass – we are changing our approach approach to allow you to unlock more skins and calling cards. all these other fun things. And then the most customizable, we have custom mutations. We have bots. All of these things come together to give us the necessary experience for Black Ops IV.
GamesBeat: With the three experiences in one, where does it come from?
Blundell: You can look at it from different angles. I like to look at it from an adrenaline point of view. You have multiplayer, which is just snap snap snap, a very fast tempo. Then you have Zombies, which is more of a mean tempo than the key spikes. And then you have Blackout, which is a slower initial bit, then the intensity increases as the circle gets closer and the conflict weighs you down.
Depending on your mood, your tempo, your style of action game, there is a mode for you, but all modes are focused on social interactions. It's about being there with your friends and stories that you can tell based on what we put in the toolbox. The same story will not be told twice. It will be more like, "Today, I did it with zombies. I did it in Blackout. I just played this game in multiplayer. This is how we approached it.
GamesBeat: The variety between the three different Zombies experiences, what is each of them supposed to convey? It seemed to me that you had a pretty good idea that IX was more accessible or more accessible, so we should start there and end up with travel.
Blundell: Each has a different set of properties that appeals to different people. The zombie community is actually quite complex in terms of the different groups that identify and say, "That's what we do." For example, there is a high level community. Their goal is simply to get the highest possible turn on a map and say, "That's what I did." Even these guys subdivided into "did you do it with benefits? "And so on.
Then you have a narrative group. Their goal is to bring history together and understand all the complexities of history. We went further than ever in terms of visual cues, sound cues, lines of dialogue, physical things. And then you have the guys from the easter egg. Their goal is for main quests, sub-quests, sub-quests and hidden things. I'm looking at it, but each of these groups is at different levels of detail for what is being sought.
Each card has different combinations of items that help these different groups or prevent them from achieving their goals. As you said, IX, it's a good start. I say that because, spatially, it allows you to do more. It has some big open spaces. It warms you up pretty well. Blood of the Dead is next. Difficulty, spatially, it's somewhere in the middle. Then you have travel, very narrow corridors, very narrow spaces. It becomes difficult very quickly. And then you have Classified, which is a combination of Blood and Travel, with restricted spaces and open spaces.
It's just the space component, but I could go through each of those maps and break them down. I could emphasize the aspect of the story, which you can get at best depending on what interests you. Each of them consists of a matrix and describes the objectives we have.
Above: The cast of Zombies
Image credit: Activision
GamesBeat: How many rounds are we talking about in each? We have certainly not reached the maximum. I think we did 13 or more.
Blundell: To give you an idea, we had a hard limit of 255 in the past. We removed it. The maximum sleeve limit you can reach in Black Ops IV is 1024. We have also introduced difficulty levels. The difficulty is easy, until realistic. Our hardcore group, who plays every day and has been playing for 10 years, broke the record of Round 100 on a normal day. When we set it as realistic, the maximum they normally reach is 12.
We made the task even more difficult, if you want to go, but then we put all the comfort. If someone is a beginner, a newcomer, he can put robots. He can settle it with ease. They can have a more fluid experience, get into the mode and find their feet.
GamesBeat: I had trouble with normal. I can not imagine what realism looks like.
Blundell: Realistic is a point of damage. Normally you have 150 life points. Realistically, if you suffer damage, you are dead. If a grenade explodes there and you receive some damage, you are dead. That's the madness there. And people will do it.
The other thing, I do not know if you noticed it, but in the after action report, in the top right is a sentence you saw. It would say something like, "Fluffy red apples are in the tree." If you take this passphrase and gamertag and go to callofduty.com/BOAS, Black Ops Authenticity Stamp, and you type it It gives you a detailed report on everything you did in your game. You can swap this code with your friends for blazing rights, by comparing the best scores.
You can do something like a first room challenge. "I did not open any doors and that's the turn I made." These are the kinds of things the community does. Now you have this buffer that proves that you did what you said, instead of delivering eight-hour video files.
GamesBeat: Do you have any advice based on what you see from people who have reached the maximum 10-15 rounds?
Blundell: If you are a beginner or if you have already played before and want to go a little further, I would say first, start with the tutorial. We have for the first time a tutorial that explains the new mechanisms. Once you pass this, start with the IX card. Put one or two bot with you. You can have up to three if you play solo. But load one or two robots to help you and set it to easy. It's a good way to start and get used to the mechanics of the level, to get used to the map.
Keeping in mind, now all Easter eggs are disabled in easy trouble, and they are also disabled with custom mutations. But this will allow you to get acquainted with the mode, to understand the types of artificial intelligence enemies, to know where are the weapons, to accustom you to use your advantages, to accustom you to use your elixirs and your talismans. This will simply familiarize you. It's a good starting point.
Above: The zombie tigers come out in IX.
Image credit: Activision
GamesBeat: Lacking those elixirs is probably a common problem.
Blundell: Some people from the community – this is from elsewhere what we designed, by the way. Elixirs are not required to be part of it. They are all nice to have. If you are a terrible player like me, it's a necessity. But everything is designed so that you do not have to use them. Obviously, playing the game, you produce this chemical, nabulium plasma. We like to use difficult words to attach the tongue. This is what you bring to the laboratory to continue receiving your elixirs and talismans.
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