When you had 0 ammo in the starting pistol and had to decide between a wall weapon or a potentially useless box spin, it used to be an actual decision.

Modern zombies is something to be grinded because they can’t find ways to genuinely make the game replayable otherwise

Something about the crude white chalk outlines really just enhanced the atmosphere, the little things really do add up

I just hate how the maps have been streamlined such that all the maps play functionally the same.

The Warzoneification of Zombies needs to be studied

1:17  Pretty sure this was the last time we saw Craig Houston in anything zombies related and now it’s just Kevin “my brother plays zombies too” Drew all the time.

rarities and armor ruined zombies almost singlehandedly and i will die on that hill

There used to be genuinely bad weapons in the box too, so if you got stuck with an Essex on round 10 you had to make it work. But ever since Cold War, every single gun has to be viable so that you can level it up for warzone

First off - hats off to you for making analytical vids on zombies mechanics. Absolutely love watching them and then debating my shadow on the subject every single time after! :)

Though this time around, I want to make a few notes and argue some points:

(1) You mention PAP price as being to high. And yes, it would've been totally outrageous in old games' framework, no doubt. But in BOCW/BO6/BO7 we have ammo crates, which make investing these kind of sums into guns actually feasible, as you won't have to drop it in favor of something else just because max ammo is your only option of replenishing ammo. Sure, we've always had wall guns before which allowed to replenish ammo, but I think you do know how economy of that works (it does, just... not too great).

(2) "Another track of upgrading is just grind" - well, it is, just like racking up points using MP5K/MPL/AK74U/Vesper and other point-building guns. And if anything you have way more things to spend your points on, making rarity upgrade a feasible alternative for players to progress their weapon damage further without sacrificing getting perks/armor/ammo in a moment. Sure, the balance of this decision-making is quite weird to say the least, but just calling it "grind" is just non-descriptive. Let alone the fact that you need to timely collect the stuff at least tries to force the player to break their training pattern and go under fire.

(3) Yes, people have option of getting any gun they have and don't necessarily have to spin the box for "the good stuff". But what do you do in older zombies? You always spin the box in hopes of getting very specific stuff that is good. And the way I see it, you can call it mindless grind too, as instead of just playing the game about surviving and killing zombies, you are forced to just work around artificially created hurdle. The difference is that you just happen to enjoy this specific hurdle and not the other.

(4) In older titles, the box always had a tiny bit of "the good stuff" alongside with tons of trash no one wanted to use, making about ~70% of it's arsenal useless. The only thing that changed, is that a "good weapon" in a classic sense is now defined primarily by it's damage and not ammo reserve. But even so, the arsenal itself alongside the customization is making it way more diverse in terms of personal preference, as suddenly, player's preference is not just tied to "does it allow me to survive till next max ammo?", or damage, but to "how does this thing jive with my augments setup and my general playstyle?", which became a lot more apparent to me in cursed especially, since the idea of "point-building" guns are a thing there too. The way I see it, it's quite a bit more interesting approach, rather then "give me the resident_wonder_weapon/LMG/half-decent AR" approach from before.

As much as modern zombies are problematic in story and visual design, the gameplay is the part that I personally want to criticize the least. Not because it's flawless (not even close!), but because literal amounts of criticism I have for it that isn't based on "it doesn't work the same way like it used to" (which is not to be confused with "things are not the way they used to and that's why they're bad" - they're different things and you don't fall into this category by any means) is not that big. I'd love to see adjustments to point system, to the perks, PAP and rarity and ammo boxes, but I also understand that simply reverting changes will not make it better because they're pieces of a similar yet quite different gameplay loop and general system, that have their problems, but are solving others. And if you keep looking at them one by one in a vacuum, of course they'll look like a change for the sake of change, but it won't make it true.

I think the one thing we should give vanguard credit for is that it ties the rarity to the Pack-A-Punch level

a lot of people are talking about vanguard and I think that vanguard's round based gameplay is genuinely super fun, I really enjoy shino reborn

one of my favourite things about old zombies is that a new person today playing origins has exactly the same experience I do - but I survive for longer because I master the map

with new zombies you level up so much outside of the actual game, that it feels like a grind for xp instead of a grind for mastery, and that's much less rewarding

vanguard actually did work to tackle this, perk levels instead of augments was actually a rewarding system, and I find myself revisiting shi no numa reborn more than any other post BO4 zombie map

Relic idea: rarities are disabled, but weapons do full damage.

Or, even better: no armor, but zombies do full bar of damage on all rounds.

Thank you for this video, Henry. Your videos are amazing  and entertainment, and your voice is relaxing to hear

I’ll never forget hoping on CW the night it dropped and getting to round 75 with a squad just sitting on top of the plane wing. We did the EE a couple nights later and never played again until a new map would come out. Modern zombies has just become a glorified camo/attachment grind and I can’t stand it. There’s too much progression in the menus and not enough in the maps and gameplay.

I like the weapon rarities. As someone who enjoys high rounds I think it gives you more to do. I was playing bo2 origins a few days ago and I got bored by round 20 cuz I had the map opened, packed all my guns, built and upgraded my staff. I was just bored that there wasn’t anything else to do. The weapon rarities gives you more to do and a reason to stay in the game. I can understand why EE hunters might not like rarities but I think it adds significantly more to the game mode

They are just redundant, we already have PaP

Outbreak was the highlight for me, it’s much better than MWZ

I’d be completely fine if rather than spawning with any gun just make it a select few like they did in BO4….

Hot take:
The reason weapon rarities (and a lot of other hated zombies mechanics) are still here is because cod is trying to cater zombies to warzone players. And tbh, I call Cold War zombies “Warzone zombies” as it’s where we started to see many of warzones mechanics bleed into the zombies modes

I still remember when that CW reveal video dropped and hearing Kevin drew say no more starting with a pistol, I knew it was gonna be a terrible idea. The class system in bo4 was already a problem as Zombies shouldn't have out of game progression imo and they decided to double down on it and make it even worse