Back in December of last year, a month or so since Call of Duty: Vanguard released, I put up an opinion piece on the latest Zombies mode that was included with it. Zombies is a game mode that has been in nearly all of the annual Call of Duty games, and on the whole they have been excellent, featuring some amazing maps. I said at the time that this current iteration felt limited but that I had optimism that the developers could pull things around to make a great mode. Sadly, with the fourth and final map The Archon dropping a week or so back, it turns out that is very not much the case.
One thing the mode has going for it is the amount of incidental dialogue that is spoken during the games. On the flipside however there is no kind of opening cinematic to these levels. The story is relatively straightforward, an evil Nazi officer named Von List has teamed up with a demonic entity, and it is up to your team (who have teamed up with opposing demonic entities) to stop him.
The first map was Der Anfang, I won't go into too much detail as this was spoken about in detail in my initial opinion post. Typically Zombies maps have always been round based wave survival against increasing numbers of undead, for Vanguard this was changed. Instead of round based survival, you start in a hub area, and then use portals to travel to various other maps in order to complete simple objectives. Der Anfang (as I mentioned previously) is a Frankenstein's monster of other maps, both from the multiplayer and single player components of Vanguard. I admit it was fun, but it did feel undeveloped, I had assumed it would be added to as the year went on, but there were no new areas or portals added (outside of a single room).
I hoped that this was a one shot experiment and that the second map onwards would go back to the traditional round based gameplay that fans all love. Terra Maledicta dropped in February and unfortunately may have been in an entirely new location, yet depressingly was another weird experiment into using a hub area to travel to different maps to complete objectives. One good thing about the map was that it appeared to be entirely new, taking place in Egypt by some ruins out in a desert that had melded with the demon world. The stale gameplay loop meant this was something I really didn't play much.
Finally, in June of this year, after much negative feedback (and a bizarre statement saying the developers had 'forgotten' how to create round-based maps), a proper round based survival map was added to Vanguard, in the form of fan favourite Shi No Numa. The map is certainly a classic, and with a new 'Dig-Site' area added it felt like it finally had a section of the map with which to shake off the claustrophobia of the narrow pathways. I thought this map was hands down the best Vanguard had to offer, not that there was much competition. Personally I wish this had done more. Call of Duty: Cold War featured a remake of Nacht der Untoten called Die Maschine which became an amazing remake due to a shift in time period and quadrupling the map size. Shi No Numa is far more restrained, taking place in the same time period and despite its modern graphics didn't really feel too different to versions which have come before. Including the mobile games this is the seventh time it has been in a Zombies mode.
My interest in Zombies had slipped so much that I didn't notice that a fourth and final map was being added for Vanguard's fifth and final season. It was only after going onto the game to play multiplayer that me and my friend realised there was not just a new Zombies map, but that it was another round-based one. The Archon is its name and it came out August 24th. My high hopes for this were quickly dispelled after discovering it takes place in the exact same location as Terra Maledicta. In fact, this appears to be exactly the same map, just with a slight palette swap and with the portals exchanged for wave based survival. Firstly, it feels roughly forced into being round-based, the open level has a poor design to it, with all areas looking identical to each other. Secondly, it feels unfinished. Every time we got to the end of the round, me and my friend would be stuck having to search the huge level for the final zombie to kill to proceed. I seem to recall all other games the zombies would respawn near you if it was near the end of a round. We got to the seventh round and then just gave up out of boredom.
The conspiracy nut in me feels that Vanguard's Zombies was purposely poorly designed in order to kill the mode. I can't see any other reason to explain just how much of an afterthought it was. From the start it was poor, extremely limited, and with reused maps, this wasn't something that kept pulling me back. Worse than being plain bad, this instead commits the cardinal sin of being boring to play. It feels weird to say this, being such a fan of the mode, but I almost wish they just hadn't even bothered including this with Vanguard. It has seriously dampened by interest, and if this is the way that future installments will go then it really is the beginning of the end. Something really needs to be done to bring fans of the mode back to the series, as this experiment was an unmitigated disaster.
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