Just got my signed artbook for winning ZombieZone! I can't thank @evanf1997_ @cbgray_ and @Treyarch enough for hosting events like ZombieZone as they've been such a blast and honor to compete in 🫡 Shoutout to the goat team for winning 2 hunts this year as well ❤️

My feedback for Zombies (Short version, long version may become a video): EASTER EGGS One thing I really hope the Zombies team at Treyarch leans into going forward is more logic-based puzzle steps, like the river crossing puzzle from Rex Infernus, and fewer happenstance steps, like the decoy grenade from Kowakujō. I love when an Easter Egg hunt goes longer, but I want that time to come from the community knowing we're looking in the right place and struggling to figure out the actual solution to a puzzle, code, or device. Otherwise, you can have everyone spending hours or even days searching an area without ever knowing if they're remotely close to the beginning of the step. Obviously, creating actual puzzles takes more development time than hiding an object somewhere on the map. But I think part of what made the BO3/BO4 era so fun to hunt was how much detail existed throughout the maps and story (something we will talk about later into this). You wanted to investigate every crevice because it felt like you could naturally discover something (maybe not the bones in rev, that just made 0 sense). There are clearly a lot of creative minds working on these steps. Something like the exfil step from Rex Infernus deserves a ton of credit because it genuinely required outside the box thinking. I just think Zombies is ready for more great logic puzzles and a little less licking walls until something happens. I also think Easter Eggs have a broader progression problem. I feel like I'm taking almost the exact same path every time I replay one. Getting PaP 3 and max weapon rarity across everything requires so many points and so much scrap that repeat runs can turn into waiting until I've checked every box before entering the boss and they're a requirement. I'm not entirely sure what the solution is there, other than maybe scrapping... well...the scrap system. Along with the box feeling not great, armor, etc. The rewards also aren't good enough anymore. These quests require an enormous investment from the development team. They have elaborate steps, environments and some genuinely incredible boss fights that I'm sure aren't cheap to make. But after completing them, I'm usually rewarded with a slightly different calling card and an operator skin that can feel mediocre compared to something available in the shop that same day. I understand it's a business, but I think you'd get significantly more player engagement with Easter Eggs if the rewards felt substantial and carried into other parts of CoD. Give us unique attachments. Camos. Weapon unlocks. Operator skins that just plain SLAP. Give Day 1 completions a special label on the calling card (maybe too much of an ask given lack of API at this time). LET ME WEAR NYXARA'S DRAGON FORM AS A SKIN. The good news is that I think Treyarch mostly nailed the Easter Eggs this year. They were incredibly exciting to cast on Day 1. I just want more people to have a reason to play them. BOSS FIGHTS I really loved the direction of the bosses this year, but I think they're limited by the fact that you can't wipe at the boss and immediately reset the encounter. If Zombies wants to take that next step into something new, similar to what @perditionforest has talked about, I think we're incredibly close to having genuinely raid like encounters. If that's the direction they want to go with, I'm all for it! We've already seen pieces of it. Final stands with the Sentinel Artifact in The Tomb. Shielding ourselves from Nyxara's flames in Kowakujo. Mechanics requiring actual teamwork instead of simply dumping damage into a giant health bar. Dravakar is probably my favorite example of almost getting it completely right. His attack pool requires constant movement, and destroying the heads as a shield-break mechanic makes great use of the Wonder Weapon and encourages teamwork. My issue is that the fight also feels heavily scripted, not as bad as the Dark Heart, that one is a rough one to do simply because it just takes so long and is too scripted. In Dravakar, you reach damage thresholds that seemingly prevent players from coordinating builds and stacking damage to dramatically speed up the encounter. I could be wrong about exactly how those thresholds work, but that was my experience playing it. I'd love to see Zombies embrace more build variety, buffs and debuffs, and encounters where teams can discover ways to optimize their damage. Less health gating and more mechanics or time gates where something dangerous happens if you don't execute correctly. Let great teams become REALLY great at these fights. STORY / ATMOSPHERE / MAPS I'm admittedly not the biggest Zombies story guy, but I wasn't very engaged with this story from the beginning, and I think a lot of that connects back to atmosphere. I want Zombies maps to do more than have elements of a vibe. I want them to make me curious about the place I'm standing in. Watch the Gorod Krovi intro and then load into a modern Zombies map and I think you can immediately feel the difference in atmosphere. Seeing the costume changes, the UI changes, the mystery box changes, and more map changes to fit the themes of maps is super important to me as a player. It's a lot of little details that add up to make my brain happy playing and I feel like that has been missing. Some of that may come from the look and feel of the modern CoD engine, but some of it also feels like a product of development time. Intel sitting on the ground doesn't excite me nearly as much as environmental storytelling. Show me. Don't tell me. I miss walking through a map and finding a bloodied soldier with "WE DIED FOR WHAT?" written beside him in his own blood. Something like that immediately makes me ask questions about what happened there without an audio log having to explain it to me. Kevin Drew talked about just how many Zombies maps this team has managed to ship from Cold War through today, and that output is genuinely an enormous accomplishment. But if the choice is between more maps and giving fewer maps the time necessary to make their worlds feel truly alive, I'd love to see what this team could create with more time. GENERAL Overall, I think BO7 Zombies was a really strong evolution of BO6. It took what worked in that game and built on it in the way a good sequel should. My biggest issues are things I don't think another yearly sequel automatically fixes: Easter Egg design, boss philosophy, story, atmosphere, and the general gameplay loop. I've also personally started feeling a little burned out on this style of Zombies and find myself craving more of that classic flavor again. My suggestion would be to look back toward some of the ideas BO4 experimented with and build forward from there, although in a lot of ways I think Treyarch has already started doing exactly that. More than anything, I think Zombies needs time. Time for the developers to experiment. Time to build something weird. Time to create maps filled with details again. Time to rethink systems that have now existed for multiple games instead of simply iterating on them. The team has shipped an unbelievable amount of Zombies over the last several years. I hope they get a well earned break, and when Zombies returns, I hope they've been given the time to deliver something genuinely new and grand. Thanks for reading. ♥️🫡

Moon has been at the 19 minute barrier since February of 2023. Last night, I broke the Moon Megas BO3 World Record with a time of 18:59.8. So proud of this run. Look forward to a video soon 🫶🏼🔥🌕

ZombieZone is a wrap for BO7 😢 Thank you SO MUCH to everyone who tuned in for Rex Infernus and to @Treyarch for hosting us! 🥹 I hope you guys enjoyed our coverage, ZoneEvents would truly be nothing without all of you guys who tune in to support ❤️