Call Of Duty Zombies Dev Has 'Big Plans' For The Mode
It's no lie that the Call of Duty: Vanguard Zombies mode is dead. The Zombies have turned on each other after nobody set foot on the poorly designed and half-assed maps - leaving pools of flesh and nothing to do. Well, not literally, but nobody plays Vanguard Zombies. The mode is dubbed as the worst variant of the round-based undead exodus that the Call of Duty franchise has ever seen.
With so much expectation behind Vanguard's Zombie mode, since Treyarch took the reigns again after a masterful Black Ops Cold War era (the popular Outbreak mode proved to be quite the hit), the excited fan base was soon found to be majorly disappointed.
The lack of an actual round-based map had proved perilous for Vanguard, as people flocked back to previous iterations of the franchise, and despite Treyarch's best efforts of implementing a reworked Shi No Numa, it remains a doomed year of Zombies action.
However, Treyarch's five months of development time to lend a helping hand to a struggling Sledgehammer Games might have been the reason why Vanguard was such a flop, having usually been given a tri-yearly rotational time frame to create monstrous tales. Now, Treyarch has turned its back on Vanguard and eyed its own future with some "big plans".
What's Next For Call Of Duty Zombies?
As Modern Warfare 2 sits on the horizon - and with a two-year stint breaking the mould of annual releases - this means Treyarch has its usual time frame to get stuck into the Zombies realm, stepping right-foot first into the aether and pack-a-punching the game mode.
Now, the development team has promised "big plans for Zombies" in the future, as it rolled out a range of employment roles within the design team, ahead of a 2024 project.
The roles include a Zombies Gameplay Engineer and a Weapons Gameplay Engineer, whose responsibility will be to advance the Wonder-Weapon game that has been yearning for creativity since Black Ops 1's Thundergun; here's to hoping that the Ray Gun isn't butchered again.
Can Treyarch Save Call of Duty Zombies?
The immediate future of Zombies still lies in Vanguard, as Season 4 will see Shi No Numa be rolled out, which fans did think would be a catalyst for more remakes of classic maps. While fans ponder over a possible Nazi Zombies return to Kino Der Toten (given Vanguard's WWII setting) it now appears that Treyarch is full-steam ahead on its own 2024 project.
If early reports are to be believed, the upcoming Modern Warfare 2 will have a DMZ game mode, rather like Warzone albeit in a survival-like manner and slightly similar to that seen in Modern Warfare 3. With Infinity Ward's long list of third game modes spanning to Spec-Ops, Survival, and subsequently Warzone, it's likely we won't be seeing Zombies return until Treyarch takes over with an unannounced title.
For Zombies fanatics, being hindered to Black Ops Cold War and the retro games will be your best bet to quench your bloodlust, although Treyarch look set to bring the game mode back to its best when its opportunity comes around.
Interestingly, the vacancies at Treyarch confirm that we will see it be a lead designer once again, and albeit this was a given, it's nice knowing that the Black Ops sub-franchise will continue when Modern Warfare 2's two-year venture comes to an end.
