Opinion: Elena thinks that Outbreak is the right way to think about Call of Duty. For her, the mode could even become a Warzone competitor.
If you have your way, Call of Duty’s zombies could quickly crawl back into their graves. Whether it’s the undead in Call of Duty Warzone or the zombie modes in Black Ops Cold War, none of it is luring any of you out from behind the tombstone. At least, that’s what the retrieval figures for corresponding articles on GameStar.de suggest.
And that’s a mistake! Because the new Outbreak mode in Season 2 delivers exactly what I’ve wanted for CoD Cold War since release: an exciting, expansive mode with unique selling points that can even compete with Warzone.
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A large open world
I get claustrophobic on Cold War’s regular zombie maps. Zombie hordes constantly trap me somewhere in narrow entrances and only have to lightly breathe on me during later waves for me to drop dead. Outbreak is just the opposite: the sprawling maps are more reminiscent of Warzone – I sneak through buildings, fight my way through forests and factories.
If a swarm of zombies threatens to overrun me, I can make a daring jump out of a window or escape in a vehicle – or I can use the jump pad to catapult myself miles into the air and then parachute halfway across the map. If Plunder is Warzone’s nimble little brother, the even faster, more action-packed Outbreak is The Flash by comparison.
Cold War is in desperate need of a big, gripping mode: Fireteam Dirty Bomb brings exciting ideas on paper on exactly the same large-scale maps – but without a team including voice chat, you simply don’t see any land against well-rehearsed squads there. Even challenging AI zombies can be shot out of their rotten heads, either alone or together with strangers.
The player sets the tone
Warzone lets the map shrink with gas, in Plunder the clock is ticking, and in the regular zombie modes the next wave is impatiently scratching its hooves. Outbreak puts the reins in the player’s hands: you land in the open world and are free to explore, collect weapons and items, complete challenges for rewards, hunt elite enemies or simply shoot zombie hordes into nirvana until you no longer feel like it.
You only move on to the next map when you start the objective. And even then, Outbreak gives you a choice: Do you want to move on, or do you want to keep chasing loot and leveling up your equipment? Or even quit altogether and keep the rewards you’ve bagged so far? You control the pace in Outbreak and the difficulty.
If you hunt from objective to objective, you’ll experience a much crisper challenge with tougher enemies at levels 2 and 3. Those who take it easy start the next round with full armor and particularly powerful weapons or perks.
CoD must evolve
The battle royale genre has been stealing the show from classic multiplayer deathmatches for years – even within Call of Duty thanks to Warzone. And this is where Cold War gets it exactly wrong: It bottles old wine in new bottles. Shallow multiplayer battles, score breaks, zombies – that’s what Black Ops has always been known for.
But Outbreak feels new, fresh and different. Suddenly Call of Duty plays like a motivating open-world loot shooter, always holding the next upgrade or cool weapon in front of me like a carrot. And it does so on completely different maps, which sometimes send me to a snowy ski resort and sometimes to an abandoned horse ranch.
Even the objectives break out of the usual: I’m not just defending something against zombies, but have to survive in a horror house while the undead tear beams off the windows or crawl out from under beds. Or I escort a rover from one dimension gate to the next, load up canisters, face particularly strong bosses – sure, at the core I still shoot my way through hordes of zombies, but always with a special twist.
Or I break windows on the side and collect zombie essence, because I’m completing a challenge at the same time. If you want, you can spend a lot of time on the individual maps. One problem remains, however: Outbreak is only Free2Play until March 4. After that, you’ll have to buy CoD Cold War to continue playing the new zombie mode.
Outbreak should stay free!
Another serious mistake, in my opinion. Outbreak should not just disappear into oblivion as an additional zombie mode. Treyarch should rather make it permanently available for free and provide it with new objectives and maps. Maybe even with real missions or regular events? Of course, Treyarch can’t just launch another open-world shooter – the cost and effort would be disproportionate.
But Warzone was only able to take off because the mode was released for free, making it immediately accessible to an enormous number of players – quite the opposite of Black Ops 4’s Battle Royale, if you remember that experiment. With a correspondingly large player base, Outbreak could be financed via cosmetic in-game purchases as usual, and would remain relevant and lucrative for much longer thanks to updates – just like Warzone, which survived Modern Warfare’s multiplayer.
Cold War would finally have the chance to do its own thing here and stand out from Battle Royale standards and classic multiplayer with fresh ideas for CoD.
