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...they gave Zombies Health Bars? oof. fuck that shit.

No one ever gives the “nameless” marines from nacht and verruckt enough credit. What little they did speak, they oozed personality. The player who was host was the balance between having fun and seriousness. The player who was blue got the nerd/smart soldier who loves comics. The player that got orange was the one that was nearly unhinged. The green player was the grizzled vet. The one who was all business. Their voices all fit the bill. The marines will always have a special place in my heart. Not just the marines, but most of the old casts just had more soul to them. Even the Victis crew, even with all their annoying voice lines, still have more than what we have in zombies today. A friend of mine wants an operator pack for MW3 zombies that has the ultimis crew. They wouldn’t fit at all. This was a great synopsis of the zombie community’s want for a return to the roots. Good fun, good horror…more soul. Thanks wheezy!

As a gamer who play both play both classic and modern COD, classic is awesome!! It has the story, weapons, and small reference in maps. I kept my Xbox 360 and it still work for 15 years.

New Zombies just has no seasoning man

the new COD Zombies don't even have a Easter egg song

My son (15 yrs) and I have been playing BO1 zombies in 2024 .

It's actually a huge thing right now affecting the games industry. Company's that are now massive and successful are out of touch with what made them successful in the first place. The people who put time and effort into these games are gone. These company's are shells of what they used to be and forgot why they became successful in the first place.

I turned on the original Black Ops and was pleasantly surprised at how active the Zombies servers still are

I like the classics more

I truly miss the old days 😞

MW3 zombies literally feels like running into a group of zombies on the cod mobile battle royale, but on console

The only modern zombies I had fun with was Cold War. That really says a lot.

Classic zombies, for me, ended after BO3. The original storyline had me hooked and watching 3 hour explanation videos about just one map for example. The easter eggs were fun, difficult but doable and the community at BO3 was more hooked than ever with everyone contributing.

I sometimes like to regard the BO3 zombies killing the classic versions of the characters as a literal metaphor for how activision was going to kill the mode and it’s story

Modern zombies are an insult to the franchise, they are insipid, soulless, they lack personality and feel like Warzone hijacked the aether universe and completely fucked it. The only way I see zombies coming back to its glory is a stand alone game of Aether Zombies, changing the arc of BO4 and closing the story as our beloved characters deserve

Everything past BO3 feels like zombies warzone. There was so much simplicity back in the day and it’s insane that people enjoy this shit now. When WAW came out it was self explanatory along with everything that came after that. I’m assuming if you enjoy modern zombies you were not there was original came out and you played it years later. Modern zombies is easily dog shit. Cold War, vanguard, modern warfare. The story back then and everything was great.

I realized I may have made a hypocritical point with the campaign crossovers into zombies. The FIVE crew are real figures and are in the campaign, but the difference between them and campaign characters in the latest COD games is that this cast was for fun, on a bonus map. Their personalities are exaggerated and made to be their own, while Cold War and beyond the characters help lead the main storyline forward. Too much spotlight is on them. Hope the video is able to bring some good discussion in these comments, let me know your thoughts.

Sadly we live in a time where the developers don’t care about the players who have played from the start. They’d rather attract new players than keep their old ones

The most painful part about this for me, is seeing such a fantastic and wondrous legacy of zombies be ruined and neglected, it always pains me to see the new iterations of zombies because I always have hope that someone would put time, effort, and care into this universe only for it to be another disappointment. All I can hope for is a miracle at this point.

man nothing will top the hype of zombies chronicles dropping in summer 2017. the last great zombies experience.

Elena Siegman’s “115” Easter Egg will always be my fav

Nothing will top the WaW-BO3 era of zombies

I'm glad I'm not the only one that HATES the modern cod HUD. Whenever I bring it up as a complaint it's always brushed off as nitpicking, but I think it is seriously annoying and distracting from the gameplay

Time is never an excuse when it only takes 2 months to make a map post launch

Zombies lives on in custom zombie maps on Black Ops 3 (and WaW). Some of the custom BO3 maps even rival the stuff Treyarch has made and there are so many maps to play with new ones constantly being made. Old zombies will never die thanks to the zombies community, even if we don't get it from official sources

You can turn parts of the UI off in cold war and it makes it so much better

What's mind blowing to me is seeing how another zombies team even figured out how to give a zombie map charm and personality with a cast and aesthetic of a new map. Infinite warfare zombies had a fucking COOL idea with the vibrant and colorful theme park setting. The charm wore off on the other maps to me personally cause it felt like they were just kinda repeating what worked on zombies in spaceland. But still a fucking cool concept and having real life figures like david hasslehoff and the music choices from the era added a lot more life than anything we've seen from modern zombies.

WAW-Bo4 we had map packs, yes you paid money for them but you got guaranteed content for multiplayer and zombies, Modern warfare 2019 removed that for battle passes and overpriced shop bundles, with this system we have no guaranteed number of zombies maps hence why Vanguard only had 4 maps and MW3 is just the warzone map copied and pasted, they removed the zombies characters and replaced them with soulless shop bundle operators. Chances are they won’t bring back a crew of original characters for zombies because they want money from the shop bundles.

I'm happy that i got the bo1 / 2 and 3 experience, the hype was unreal; Piecing the story and finding the easter eggs, it's a shame that more modern cod players wont experience that.

I agree, one of the things that made the mode start deteriorating is getting rid of the set crews/characters. Playing as whatever operator you pick is as soulless as it gets, and even worse you spawn in with any gun now, they've lost the plot to what made the mode unique and interesting. Vanguard & MWZ cannot even be categorized as your usual COD zombies anymore. The best we've gotten in recent years is BOCW zombies, which even then that was pretty mediocre & soulless when you compare it to the older stuff. Some might try to say that we're looking at the past with rose-tinted glasses, but in this case that couldn't be further from the truth. Zombies is objectively a husk of what it used to be. Nowadays the mode is used as a means to drive up sales, because zombies sells more than yet another broken & boring spec ops mode, or an experimental mode like DMZ where they have no idea how the majority of players will like it. 16 month development time for MWIII be damned; for $70, consumers deserve so much better than a throwaway filler mode like MWZ, the new king for worst campaign in franchise history, and a multiplayer that is just average with a hefty side of nostalgia bait. I think that's one of the big issues with COD nowadays in general, those stuck in the yearly addiction cycle try their best to defend & settle for pure mediocrity. It's no wonder why the wider gaming community sees this franchise as a joke that you eventually graduate from/grow out of. Treyarch's game this year is likely the last chance a lot of people are willing to give for a true return to the former quality of zombies. It remains to be seen if their 4 years of record development time will result in something great or not.

They should reboot zombies by doing a whole treyarch spin off with the original shadows of evil characters.

Classics are always going to be golden. The only one I really enjoyed outside of classics was Infinite Warfare’s zombies; theme was different, and the maps were pretty cool- especially interactive.

Yes, Call of Duty's Zombie mode in Black Ops 1 was simply fantastic. After Advanced Warfare in 2015, I stopped playing Call of Duty altogether, including the multiplayer where I used to excel. However, in 2024, I bought Black Ops 3 and rediscovered my passion for Call of Duty Zombies with the old map packs. Playing the classic Black Ops 1 maps in Black Ops 3 with modern graphics and new features is just so enjoyable. I'm currently playing Black Ops 3, and I love it.

Cold War and BO4 are genuinely good

Loved the video! ❤

I don't blame them for BO4 and Coldwar zombies (and WWII, and Vanguard, but those are so bad on their own anyway), but MW3 zombies is so beyond boring. It is insane to me that a team of people made that and said "yea, they'll love this". Mind blowing.

Excellent video. Watching Zombies completely shed any and all identity it once has that made it stand out in the industry despite just being a side mode has been frankly depressing. Each successive game just seems to lose more and more of what made the mode special and I honestly don’t see it recovering, even when round based comes back. Cold War being heralded as a ‘return to Zombies’ roots’ felt so fake when all that really meant was it was round based again, there’s so much more that made up Zombies’ DNA than it being round based but it seems like that’s just not understood anymore. Here’s to hoping Gulf War is decent but somehow I strongly doubt it’ll be even 10% as good as Zombies once was

I think adding Mason and Woods from BO1 and Captain Price and Soap from Modern Warfare to be the new crew of zombies would have been so fuckin cool like even if they're not supposed to be in the same universe it would have been sick to see those four banter with each other 4 badasses of the apocalypse

I just want to say that I feel a similar split between WaW - BO2 zombies and BO3 - BO4 zombies. I liked the whole Vril concept and the mysterious forces beyond everyone's control, and I feel like BO3 ruined that by making it into a bunch of multiversal squid monsters. Yeah, somehow an underground race of winged humanoids = tentacle monsters. It's too colorful, nothing's gritty, the bad guys are hentai demons, they vomit 115 rocks, everything's an interconnected multiverse, etc etc. BO3 is fun to play & all, but I just don't like how diferent the story & aesthetic *feel* from the first 3 games. Anyone else feel this way too?

love the editing, music and cuts great video man

Dude hit the nail on the head. Great video

One thing I noticed with the new games is the Easter eggs are almost non existent except for the main story Easter egg all the side Easter eggs don’t exist

Honest to God, the UI elements are the #1 thing that has kept me from even trying any of the new zombie modes for more than a single match. I'm so glad you brought it up, because it's so excessive that I feel like my brain is being fuckin' DDoS'd by the screen. It's all redundant and unnecessary information and I find myself so irritated just looking at the screen that I can't even be bothered finding out if the new modes are any good anyway (my guess was and still is- no). The old UI was so bare-bones and simplistic, and yet I never once found myself thinking that I needed more information on my screen. CoD devs have been all too happy to oblige us anyway in newer releases. I see the zombies. I know my bullets are hitting them. I know they're losing health. I know I'm killing... er, eliminating them. I know where I am on the map... and so on. 95% of the crap on screen is completely unnecessary. Game UIs seem to be degrading across the entire industry though. So confusing. It's like they think we're all morons who need all the information the game could possibly provide to us explained on screen at all times, lest we get lost.

What started as an afterthought became popular, was developed, then overdeveloped. Many such cases. Nacht der Untoten was a really interesting thing in WAW, a neat unlock for completing the game. It drew interest, and for good reason. The following maps, characters and story development were great. The lore and characters were expressed almost exclusively though gameplay and short Easter eggs, through what the player observed and could piece together from what they found. The gameplay was clunky, but the aesthetic was perfect, they nailed it. The first Black Ops was, for the most part, a successful addition. It continued along the same established formula. It also included a few off-brand additions, like Dead Ops Arcade, Five and Call of the Dead, additions that were fun on their own and should have remained outside of the main formula. Moon then cemented the first detraction from the gameplay loop, the cosmonaut, an enemy type that is a slog to kill and returns shortly afterward, disrupting the primary tactic of training zombies around. George Romero was the same way as the cosmonaut, but that would have otherwise been an interesting one-off thing. Black Ops II is where the story was first derailed, introducing more maps that should have been their own story, but were also needlessly integrated into the grander cannon. The main story with the original characters too was needlessly over-complicated, all at once. What followed was further detractive deviations in gameplay, lore dumping, over-complication, and side stories that should have been their own self-contained things instead adding to the blah-blah-blah of the already needlessly grandiose and increasingly borderline schizophrenic storyline. It was all so much better when it was still relatively grounded, when it was just a slightly metaphysical science fiction about alternate history.

Hey wheezy, new viewer and now new subscriber! Iv played zombies since world at war in highschool and have thought about this topic so much. I believe what happened was the original devs that worked on the zombies game left mid blackops 4 to form deviation games following Jason blundells sudden departure. My personal theory is that many of the characters story writers, level design and gameplay leads and Jason himself self were pivotal to creating zombies as we knew it. They may have seen the writing in the wall around that time which was when chronicles was made. It would explain the reason why blackops 4 had such odd map choices and unpolished levels in its dlc and the new story cut short out of nowhere. Awesome video man, keep it up!

Amazing video!

It’s so clear that the executives (and some devs) don’t care about player happiness and are making SLOP bc they know a large chunk of the player base will buy the game anyways. It can’t be THAT hard to study the old cod and make new stuff from it. Being a classic zombies player means nothing to them. They don’t care about loyalty at all.

thank you, everyone praises cold war. mostly kids which makes sense. it probably was when they got introduced into the game mode. but cold war was the last zombies game i played. It felt like the soul started slipping there. The atmosphere, story, etc lost me. Overcomplicated, cluttered, soulless and like you said it became nothing but a camo grinder. The game mode wasnt even hard either

u gonna blow up! keep it up g

WW2 zombies was pretty good. If they’d pushed for the horror angle more it would’ve been better though.

Ive played both classic and new cod zombies and I still think that Cold War was the last game with a soul left after that its just another mode with nothing to make it stand out

Im in the minority but Mob of the Dead was the shift in zombies to the over produced, unnecessarily complex, UI overload gameplay that zombies has shifted into today

If they didn’t add anything to Cold War people would say that it’s just a copy and paste of the old games

Five was also part of the lore but only real ones would know that😕

BO4 zombies is a masterpiece compared to the new ones

Vae victis is the only one to understand how to do a zombie style open world map

been commenting all this on their page for years. agree with you 100% thank u for making this video

THE LASTR SENTIMENT WAS ABSOLUTELY SPOT ON. COULDN'T AGREE MORE, sorry for caps, i didn't realize they were on. but literally took the words out of my mouth bro i hope that they can some how go back to the glory days, one day.

Personally, the worst aspect of modern Cod zombies (apart from the gameplay) it's the story and the characters. The only interesting characters are Richtofen and Samantha (old characters from the previous universe tho). And they also combined the current zombie storyline with the campaign one... LITERALLY WHAT?! In my opinion, they should pretend that Black Ops 4 story never happened and do something better after "Revelations" ending. Well, it's just an opinion. Not everything about modern zombies it's bad or mediocre. Although, well we still have Black Ops 3 and WAW custom maps.

watching this after the black ops 6 zombies reveal and i gotta say, the new default crew gives me hope

After 2015, it fell off a major *and I mean major* damn cliff

Just bring back Jason blundel. I don’t think he did a bag thing with bo4 I think it was just the whole game trying to be different. We need really good maps again

As a dedicated Cod veteran for 15 years since the classic MW2 I've had a significant fun experience playing shooter games since middleschool up to this day including BO1 zombies. Back then it was mostly playing solo and grinding high-rounds while learning the lore of the game, but other times I played co-op with random players and it wasn't as toxic as it is today, the BOCW is a joke of zombies mode since BO4, the MW series never should have had zombies to begin with ever since the Warzone spooky event in MW19 during the pandemic.

I remember as a kid how hyped i was for when JD2020 on their WaW forums announced Shi No Numa back in World at war. The amount of times i watched that trailer, hearing the iconic Dempsey, Takeo, Nikolai and Richtofen for the first time i wish i could go back....

you know that the new call of duty game is popular that you learn of its release after 7 months

well said bro. old zombies any day.

I have no idea why the hell you can’t turn off the kill feed thing. At least you can get rid of health bars in Cold War. The problem is the entire game’s innovation was in its between-match progression which made all the maps feel the same and took away the core of zombies. You no longer build up an arsenal each match. It is all unlocked and leveled up by grinding and then you are super OP. No personality and no mechanical innovations between maps.

Best perk is stamin-up💯🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥

i think the biggest flaw with the new games is the lack of "Arcade" feeling, where the difficult of the game was completely up to the person behind the screen, up until BO2 you could play with a fresh account and perform just as good as you did by playing on a veteran account, but from BO3 onward, they added unlockables upon unlockables to alter gameplay in an unbalanced way. While the gunsmith to bring custom guns in game was pretty cool, the most hideous feature has to be the upgrades in both CW and MWIII, they completely break the already little balancement the game has to begin with, making a newbie far less skilled than a seasoned player in all possible ways.

I remember Waw literally forced you to camp and work as a team, then something happened in black ops 1 and it became more practical to run around

For me, nothing will ever top the original 4 (though Kino and Five came the closest). These maps were just a straight up game of survival. No overly complicated Easter eggs, none of the extra crap they have nowadays. It was so much fun online back in those days. Before WaW got overrun with hackers, you could literally just play nonstop for weeks and never get bored. The character lines were awesome, not like the ridiculous parodies of themselves that they became later (they turned my boy Takeo from a badass Samurai into a meta memelord. Ugh…), the atmosphere was dark, you could tell the creators really put a lot of care into each map. I guess I’m probably biased, but WaW zombies, for me, will never be surpassed. I don’t even bother with the new versions anymore, I just boot up WaW or black ops 1 when I feel like playing some zombies.

Me and my mate who we both are 27 still play BO3 zombies once every week for a few games. The amount of people who still play them is incredible. But regarding modern zombies , activision only cares about making money. So that’s why you see the cross overs from campaigns to multiplayer to zombies because they can make money on skins and bundles from all three. They prey on young kids who think these CODs are good… when in fact you are gambling every day

I literally told my friend 2 days ago that they should make a Call of Duty game exclusive to zombies. But it just has every single zombies. Map that has ever been made in the game.

For me it was all about the atmosphere, that honestly started to decline with Black Ops 2 with some maps as an exception but from there onwards the atmosphere that the old games had is just gone. World at War and Black ops 1 had such a cool/spooky vibe and atmosphere, that's why I loved it. It all got way too ridiculous and colourful.

The closest you’ll get to old school zombies is Cold War. I hate to break it to you. I personally really enjoyed it but I also yearn for the days of BO1-3 zombies and hell even bo4 to a degree

As someone who enjoyed both but prefers the old zombies games. I don’t think much of either Vanguard or MW3, as they weren't modes in a mainline Treyarch game I think Cold War was a step in the right direction gameplay-wise, but they strayed way too far in appealing to casuals by having spoon-feed you pretty much everything from HUD to EE. I’m optimistic about Gulf War zombies, but I really hope they strike a good balance between the hardcore community and the casuals. Is this hope or cope? We shall see.

I'd argue that the Cold War Zombies has absolutely no identity. It feels more like multiplayer than zombies. I think that it's because of the fact that the _old Treyarch_ is gone. And gone forever. The veterans designers of the mode have been leaving the studio with every new entry since Black Ops 3: Remember Jimmy Z? R.I.P (guy works on Xdefient now) Remember Jason B? R.I.P (guy is AWOL) Remember Craige... Oh, wait. He's the lead writer now. The man behind Cold War and MWZ. 😐 Anyhow, what I wanted to say is that the _new Treyarch_ consists of the new people. "Different" kinds of people, and I don't like that *difference.*

in my opinion, Cold War was the last good zombies. i personally enjoyed it, and even with the health bars it didn't ruin much the Easter eggs also had a mix of fun and challenge, like the classics

Nothing can beat loading into a BO1 kino game and getting to round 40, when you die you feel like you truly accomplished something, then you play a game of modern zombies (for me Cold War is the only game I had the time for) and get to round 100 by just circling around one part of map spamming your weapon, there feels like there’s nothing to do in modern cod, and it doesn’t look like that from the outside

Overall I agree with your points but I also think we need to acknowledge the player base has changed, and the commercial success of other modes combined with some of the creative bankruptcy the later zombies games showed, there was a need to make some changes. I didn’t love everything Cold War did, but as a reboot to the series I thought it was quite good with its quality of life tweaks as well as being inviting to new players. Cold War did a great job bridging the gap between new and old players. The cardinal sins of the past two games have been not meaningfully engaging with what Cold War built and catering entirely to a new audience while leaving the old behind.

Classic cod zombies feels like a place we aren't supposed to be, modern feels like we were invited

this isn't even a nostalgia thing. I started playing cod about 2 years ago. Bo2 and Bo4 are by far my favorite games. Mob of the dead, zetsubo, and dead of the night are the greatest maps ever made

I still really like the WWII Nazi zombies, which is fairly recent (compared to BOI).

CoD WaW, BO1, 2, and 3 are the best Cod Zombies experiences.

I think the binary of New and Old is a bit too reductive when I'd really make three eras. WaW and BO1, BO2 and BO3, and everything else. The barrier between BO1 and BO2 is just... the story and map design. The first era had more light story, stuff you'd be unlikely to experience yourself and would more read about from some nerd who took the time to listen to a radio somewhere and all that. The story was there but it was secondary to the map, where the map had character first. The map design of the first two games is more focused around what the map does rather than what the player on that map can do. It makes each gameplay experience feel more cohesive. There is cold water on Call of the Dead, there is mud on Shangri La, there is low gravity on Moon, these are great map effects, but BO2 took this a step further with player power type things. Those craftables in the early maps, those staffs on Origins, the big fella in Buried, etc. These made unique experiences more player focused rather than map focused. The gameplay changes every map to account for what abilities the map gives the player rather than merely what the map itself does for the player. It's very hard to explain but the design is apparent. And admittedly, there is overlap. The hack tool vs space suit on Moon is an example of unique player ability in BO1, and it's not like environment effects were taken away in BO2 with the bus on Tranzit or the elevators on the skyscraper map. But this unique gameplay focus was what lead to maps like Alcatraz, a lot of people's favourite map but it never captured me. The map is honestly quite boring with few unique gimmicks to it... except for stuff like the ghost mode and all that comes with it. It is certainly a unique map with unique things to do, and brings about its own experience like other maps would, but it's mostly built on player ability rather than the environment itself, which due to its popularity certainly lead into the way maps were designed in BO3. If unique player abilities never caught your attention in BO2, then chances are the only zombies games you like are WaW and BO1, and even then you probably just play BO1 because it has all the maps from WaW, unless you're into WaW's modding scene. Point being, there were a lot of zombies fans left behind by BO2's change to the formula. So there's certainly more than two zombies eras, there's three.

i think you mentioned it at the start; zombies was a bonus mode, five was a bonus map, current zombies is not and its probably made for wider audience rather than for the niche audience that likes the arcade zombie shooting experience and its immersiveness

I still dust off my PS3 to play Black Ops Zombies from time to time. It brings so much nostalgia and good memories from the good old times. Always a joy to hear the Ultimus Crew voice lines and it's so beautiful to go back to where it all began with the zombies storyline.

BO4 is an absolute masterpiece compared to the most recent entries.

Thank you for this. People really have dropped the ball when it comes to the quality of zombies, and its nice to see it broken down.

Infinite warfare and Cold War are my favourite recent zombies experiences

Tried the gear up plug for giggles, added around 10ms in ping on average.😂

Well said!

Only thing that could truly revive zombies is bringing back Jason Blundell and Jimmy Z. They’re the only 2 people that understand what zombies is.

Cod devs put their controllers down on round 5 and the dogs got ‘em

You’d think Treyarch would have learned their lesson not to clutter the screen after Black Ops 4, but nope. Also, like Black Ops 4, Cold War Zombies change a major aspect of zombies with the point system. Just like Black Ops 4 change dthe perk system.

I get where he is coming from with the health vars and notifs but no one seems to understand that you can turn that stuff off in the settings

They turned zombies into spec ops

Spent so many weekends playing nacht der untoten once verruckt, shi no numa, and der reise were added that was all my friends and I played

Not sure if you’d be interested in this, but I’d really be interested in a part 2 of this video deep diving into your thoughts and comparisons and hopes of the new shown content of blackops 6. Maybe something about the new characters, and a hope of formula?