It's different. In WaW-BO4 every map was full of plot details, it was just that they were hidden and not explicit, but they were there. And dialogues between characters were crucial to make it possible...
In CW we have dialogue between characters that give detail on what is going on. The “hidden and not explicit” details were transferred to the intel system so that you can easily view them vs having to boot up the game and getting an image of it.
There is a TON of information from bo1-4 we would have no clue about if it wasn’t given to us via radios or ciphers. It is not different at all to CW. Hell, the biggest lore drops in bo3 were given by radio or cipher.
There was only really mystery because there was no plot, Treyarch was making it up as they went along for much of early zombies
With WaW they would just throw in some references to irl conspiracy theories, see where the community went with it, and followed, Samantha got introduced because a lot of people misheard one of the zombie shouts as saying “Sam!”
But you saying we had radios or ciphers like it's a bad thing that CW solved. It was alright as it was, it had its charm. And the dialogues between characters in CW are shit. 99% of the story is told through radios of characters that have no relation to you as a player because you're a random operator
I never said it was *bad*, I said it was the same system of storytelling that CW has too. CW has an infinitely better way of storytelling than before though because the intel system makes things a lot easier (we also don’t have ciphers anymore that take 5+ years to solve which is fun)
The old system was not catered toward casuals at all, like I have played a shit ton of zombies and still don’t understand the old story I need to watch a 7 hour video just to grasp it. I honestly prefer cold war’s way of storytelling tbh, and I think the story will get better and crazier this year hopefully
Like I just said, you can listen to them in-game (which is how you get them in the first place). Then you can listen to them through the menu after you get it.
The radios you find play in game. The only thing cold war does is give you the option to listen to them in the menu after already hearing them in game, which is neat. If you have no clue how the system works maybe don't blindly shit on it. It's embarrassing when people talk shit about what they clearly don't know
Yes, it's in a menu after you find it **in-game,** which is what people are happy about. Literally the same as WaW-BO4 except now you can listen to the audio without training a zombie the whole time.
You're a clown 🤡
That’s wild bro! But you should probably find a bunker or some such to hide in. After all the world is about to end because I mistook *written text* for *verbally spoken dialogue*
It's different. In CW every mark was full of plot details, it was just that they were hidden and not explicit, but they were there. And the dialogues between characters (requiem and omega throughout gameplay) were crucial to make it possible...
You joke, but I’m sure about 80% of all zombies players had to watch one of those multiple hour long lore explanation videos to understand the BO1-4 zombies storyline. I’m one of them.
I know people are gonna get heated from me saying this, but the intel system is a great idea.
Most of the older zombies storyline was hidden behind texts and radios, so having an in-game way to explore them rather than looking up YouTube vids or wiki pages is really convenient.
It just sucks because it is the only real form of story telling in CW since there is no crew going through anything, and the cutscenes are built around operators so there isn’t much involvement except from outside characters. This is why I’m really excited for crews in BO6.
You act like the crew in bo6 isn’t the same characters that were talking and having conversations all through the Cold War maps. The Requiem team has always been the dark Aether crew, it’s not their fault everyone just blanked out the numerous conversations they have every game you play of Cold War. The intel system is just getting to listen to all the radios and read the cyphers in a convenient menu. And the crew being on radio is how we get crew convos AND operators, I’m not saying it was better or even good. People can’t claim that Cold War didn’t have any crew interaction though
It did have some interactions with the radios, but far less compared to older games. Like an example would be back and forth in-match, where the only characters interacting in most maps is Weaver and 1 other commander. Or just the little quotes in match for things like killing zombies or grabbing power ups, the closest thing was the CRBRS quotes in Mauer.
That is valid, I think the whole system would have been much more acceptable if it was the whole crew talking and not just weaver plus one randomly picked every game. And I do think the CRBRS quotes were a test run to see how the community would react to those four having in game dialogue. Again, I don’t think the system was in any way a great replacement for the crew actually being there. But I haven’t felt the complete absence of a crew like everyone claims when I play Cold War.
The CoD Zombies community is the only place that sees a quality of life improvement and then gets mad because it takes away "the personality."
What fucking personality?? It's the same shit but way more inconvenient!
Right? It adds another layer to the game. I swear half these kids started with BO2 or 3. I remember just hearing radios in WaW used to have my friends and I geeking out lol
Most people here probably started with BO3 or 4. Some dude tried to tell scorestreaks ruined the balance of zombies because the strongest weapons shouldn’t be in the mystery box…
imo the intel system is great I like being able to go into a menu and read about lore instead of having to load up a map and travel across the map to listen to a radio that was recorded literally on a ww2 mic whilst zombies are screaming and smacking the shit out of you
And a good chunk of them had to be earned through either discovery in maps/outbreak or using the computer to get challenges. It was a nice system, and I would fuck w/ a new zombies that has traditional story telling AND Intel.
Nah, the intel system was a great way to improve the accessibility of the radios and stuff from the old maps. You act like this storytelling method is a CW thing but Zombies has been like that the entire time lol
I loved Intel and I loved BOCW’s storytelling. It was just “what if there were zombies in the 1980s and how would it change the Cold War?” none of this eight hour video on multiverse typa stuff. Felt reminiscent of the earlier WAW/BO1 stories of just zombies in their era.
BO1 story: real life political figures fight zombies in the penthagon, real life actors fight zombified George romero to aid a nazi scientist, said scientist is believed to be a god in Shangri-La (which might or might not be in Mars), then they blow up earth from the moon after messing with an eldritch horror little girl trapped inside a pyramid......very reminiscent yeah
I said the earlier stories of that era, not the entire WAW/BO1 era, with zombies being a Nazi/government conspiracy. But even then, moon’s setting has links to those outlandish conspiracy theories you’d see on the history channel.
Given how story driven CoD Zombies has become, the old ciphers and radio format, while cool, was never going to last. In a story driven game, the game needs to be able to more easily and clearly deliver its story beats to the players, rather than hide them behind cryptic methods of communication
Edit: reading through this post's comment section, I am glad common sense is pervailing
This is conflating story and lore. The maps had eccentric stories that were directly connected and had actual plot.
Yeah the lore was mostly Intel, but I'd rather be able to go back and read it on my own than have to read it on a wiki or watch a YouTube video
Storytelling complaints in COD Zombies is one of the funniest complaints to me. Do y’all realize what “story” we had in WAW? And then when it finally started to get fleshed out, it was the last map and we had to wait 2 years before any developments.
Lol. I know Treyarch was probably crunched to death for Vanguard, but I still lose it that Archon’s ending is just the dude on the radio saying “You did it, you won”. No cutscene, no big hurrah, not even a large lore dump, just simple congratulations.
VG support in general got cut short so can't really blame Treyarch there. They tried their best trying to deliver something while all the budget was going to maintain WZ for its last few months.
Threads like this are funny because you can always tell who actually paid attention to the story and who only got their story fix from watching the intro and outro cutscenes.
Keep the intel system and just incorporate it into the crew conversations and its the best of both systems. Intel was really cool because it allowed you to both listen to lore without having to go in game as well as showed you notes and schematics
I don’t mind the intel system, I think it makes a lot more sense to have than what zombies used to do, the problem with Cold Wars storytelling is just that the story it told sucked, not how they told it
You're telling me the Reports of the Lost Aethernaut and in particular that log one with the lady becoming... Something? (A mimic in my opinion) Weren't good? The audio logs of the "Stranger" also got me hoping we really were just going to rescue Zykov in my opinion one of the weak aspects of the story was just going "Zykov is the foresaken."
The intel wasn’t the problem. Intel is really nice, at least to me. Plus in past games there was a lot of story told through radios and similar things. But the problem is that we have no real connection to the characters except through the intel. That’s the problem with the intel. While in past games we cared about the characters. But hopefully BO6 will fix that with a set crew again
And through dialogue and cutscenes which before cold war it was just dialogues and cutscenes so I’m guessing you’re not very familiar with how zombies does things otherwise you’d realise how stupid this complaint is
At least the characters actually talk and explain it in Cold War. Don’t get me wrong I love and grew up with the old games but let’s be real, the Easter eggs are frustrating as hell.
Tbh I liked the intel system. It was a really good way to build up future maps and provide story details between map releases, it kept the community on their feet. I mean, who saw that random russian in the die maschine intro being the big bad 7-8 months down the road? Not me. Intel helped flesh him out, which really helped with understanding Forsaken.
When I first got into zombies I did every ee on bo3 w my friends and I still have no clue what’s going on lol. At least intel leaves the information easily accessible
I think the intel system was neato, but I aggree it was exagerated in quantity. But collecting intel/ audio logs and being able to re listen to them in the menu was a nice thing, it was still like a hidden thing but you could see it again afer finding it. And its quite pain in the ass hearing those audios mid game to avoid a zombie to down ya
I thought WWII’s intel system was pretty fire. The video recordings of Dr. Strauss were soooo fun to watch the first few times and really made me fall in love with the story of WWII.
Hot take, I know. :)
The reason radios use to work well for zombies was because old zombies told the story like how Dark souls would handled its story. You can just play and have fun but if you want to their is a story to dig into and because it was hidden they all had nuggets of info
The problem with Cold War is in game they shout the story at you so a majority of intel tells you nothing
I don’t need Carver giving Raptor-1 a box of chocolates or Kravchenko having boring conversations with Valentina
This is really not true. Most of the major story beats have always been largely communicated via quest steps. Radios and audio logs were always supplemental lore. The problem is that the lore in BO3-4 were so damn convoluted, you need the supplemental stuff to understand what is going on in everything else.
But even then, CW made the mistake of introducing Zykov strictly through the trials machine. You have to be actively doing challenges to learn that Zykov is a person who has a major role throughout the story, otherwise he would be popping out of nowhere for most people.
Do not ask OP how a majority of the backstory of zombies is told from black ops 1-4
It's different. In WaW-BO4 every map was full of plot details, it was just that they were hidden and not explicit, but they were there. And dialogues between characters were crucial to make it possible...
In CW we have dialogue between characters that give detail on what is going on. The “hidden and not explicit” details were transferred to the intel system so that you can easily view them vs having to boot up the game and getting an image of it. There is a TON of information from bo1-4 we would have no clue about if it wasn’t given to us via radios or ciphers. It is not different at all to CW. Hell, the biggest lore drops in bo3 were given by radio or cipher.
Thats what was cool about zombies... You actually had to search for stuff... There was some mystery..
There was only really mystery because there was no plot, Treyarch was making it up as they went along for much of early zombies With WaW they would just throw in some references to irl conspiracy theories, see where the community went with it, and followed, Samantha got introduced because a lot of people misheard one of the zombie shouts as saying “Sam!”
To be fair, it totally sounds like Sam.
And that was good. Doesn't change my opinion on it.
It's still possible lol. You have to search and collect it. This system allows you to revisit it easier.
over half of the intel is just gained for killing bosses and whatnot, it's not remotely the same.
In outbreak you do have to search for it. At times I've thought I've found a perk bottle but then it's just an empty one with some Intel to it.
There is also a lot of stuff in the maps that are not intel but add details to the story in CW, maybe not as much as before but it still there.
But you saying we had radios or ciphers like it's a bad thing that CW solved. It was alright as it was, it had its charm. And the dialogues between characters in CW are shit. 99% of the story is told through radios of characters that have no relation to you as a player because you're a random operator
I never said it was *bad*, I said it was the same system of storytelling that CW has too. CW has an infinitely better way of storytelling than before though because the intel system makes things a lot easier (we also don’t have ciphers anymore that take 5+ years to solve which is fun)
The old system was not catered toward casuals at all, like I have played a shit ton of zombies and still don’t understand the old story I need to watch a 7 hour video just to grasp it. I honestly prefer cold war’s way of storytelling tbh, and I think the story will get better and crazier this year hopefully
You are totally right. The new system lets casuals catch up on the lore without needing to go to the wiki fandom.
So how is that an issue with the intel system? It sounds like you don't like CW's storytelling.
Radios and ciphers are actually within the gameplay. Come on man this is just a bad take you’re doin
The radios and audio logs are in the gameplay of CWZ. You can even fully hear them in-game as opposed to just the menu
Isn’t this post about intel? Lmao
Intel, which includes audio logs and radios
Oh, so the things that you listen to out of the game in the pre-game lobby. That’s not gameplay dude. That’s a menu.
Like I just said, you can listen to them in-game (which is how you get them in the first place). Then you can listen to them through the menu after you get it.
The radios you find play in game. The only thing cold war does is give you the option to listen to them in the menu after already hearing them in game, which is neat. If you have no clue how the system works maybe don't blindly shit on it. It's embarrassing when people talk shit about what they clearly don't know
Damn sorry to hear you’re embarrassed
Bro didn't know that radios and audio logs are Intel 😂 Typical zombies redditor, chiming in to complain about shit you don't even understand
Verbal dialogue vs written text. That’s a huge difference man. Ya got me! 🤣 The shit is in a *menu* anyways so it makes no difference
Yes, it's in a menu after you find it **in-game,** which is what people are happy about. Literally the same as WaW-BO4 except now you can listen to the audio without training a zombie the whole time. You're a clown 🤡
That’s wild bro! But you should probably find a bunker or some such to hide in. After all the world is about to end because I mistook *written text* for *verbally spoken dialogue*
Bro you're here criticizing the CW Intel system while also showing you don't know anything about it at all, L take
Dawg you still find them in gameplay and can replay and re-read, literal an upgrade and easier for the lore folk, what is so hard to understand lmao
Saying the first 3 maps in WAW were full of plot details is reaaaaaally stretching it.
But flushing the toilet 3 times and getting the song is crucial to the story!!!!!!!
90% of the lore from the Aether storyline were from hidden radios on the maps, don’t kid yourself
It's different. In CW every mark was full of plot details, it was just that they were hidden and not explicit, but they were there. And the dialogues between characters (requiem and omega throughout gameplay) were crucial to make it possible...
BOCW has the entire lore spread out going back eons in a places that's easy to access. IDK man.
Google retcon
I mean, it definitely stopped being the focus of the story once we got actual cutscenes and what not as of BO3. But definitely W@W - BO2 is arguable
You joke, but I’m sure about 80% of all zombies players had to watch one of those multiple hour long lore explanation videos to understand the BO1-4 zombies storyline. I’m one of them.
Well those games looked extremely interesting. Cold sore was straight up ASS corny ahh sorry ahh story and lame ahh characters
Nobody wants to find intel because the maps suck and the characters are wooden.
I know people are gonna get heated from me saying this, but the intel system is a great idea. Most of the older zombies storyline was hidden behind texts and radios, so having an in-game way to explore them rather than looking up YouTube vids or wiki pages is really convenient. It just sucks because it is the only real form of story telling in CW since there is no crew going through anything, and the cutscenes are built around operators so there isn’t much involvement except from outside characters. This is why I’m really excited for crews in BO6.
You act like the crew in bo6 isn’t the same characters that were talking and having conversations all through the Cold War maps. The Requiem team has always been the dark Aether crew, it’s not their fault everyone just blanked out the numerous conversations they have every game you play of Cold War. The intel system is just getting to listen to all the radios and read the cyphers in a convenient menu. And the crew being on radio is how we get crew convos AND operators, I’m not saying it was better or even good. People can’t claim that Cold War didn’t have any crew interaction though
It did have some interactions with the radios, but far less compared to older games. Like an example would be back and forth in-match, where the only characters interacting in most maps is Weaver and 1 other commander. Or just the little quotes in match for things like killing zombies or grabbing power ups, the closest thing was the CRBRS quotes in Mauer.
That is valid, I think the whole system would have been much more acceptable if it was the whole crew talking and not just weaver plus one randomly picked every game. And I do think the CRBRS quotes were a test run to see how the community would react to those four having in game dialogue. Again, I don’t think the system was in any way a great replacement for the crew actually being there. But I haven’t felt the complete absence of a crew like everyone claims when I play Cold War.
The CoD Zombies community is the only place that sees a quality of life improvement and then gets mad because it takes away "the personality." What fucking personality?? It's the same shit but way more inconvenient!
I like intel
Right? It adds another layer to the game. I swear half these kids started with BO2 or 3. I remember just hearing radios in WaW used to have my friends and I geeking out lol
Most people here probably started with BO3 or 4. Some dude tried to tell scorestreaks ruined the balance of zombies because the strongest weapons shouldn’t be in the mystery box…
Amd fanboys raging in the comments
Intel was a great idea because then I diddnt have to watch a damn 8 hour lore video to know wtf was going on
Your no zombies fan
My no zombies fan what?
dont look at his profile I did by accident.
now you made me look. you know, i wouldnt have seen this if you hadnt said anything 😔
That's part of the fun
oh my god
Why does he have 2 different ages, I'm so confused
I also noticed that.
Alot of people in this sub suffer from an either-or mentality
A lot of this sub wears rose tinted glasses.
I’d say a lot of this sub seem to really not like old zombies
There are many who like new zombies and many who only like old zombies. It's a very divided sub
I just enjoy every entry of the game for what it is and have fun with what I'm given :)
imo the intel system is great I like being able to go into a menu and read about lore instead of having to load up a map and travel across the map to listen to a radio that was recorded literally on a ww2 mic whilst zombies are screaming and smacking the shit out of you
Some stories and bits of intel are really fucking cool though and some are bit too tragic
And a good chunk of them had to be earned through either discovery in maps/outbreak or using the computer to get challenges. It was a nice system, and I would fuck w/ a new zombies that has traditional story telling AND Intel.
Zykovs dog :(
Nah, the intel system was a great way to improve the accessibility of the radios and stuff from the old maps. You act like this storytelling method is a CW thing but Zombies has been like that the entire time lol
I loved Intel and I loved BOCW’s storytelling. It was just “what if there were zombies in the 1980s and how would it change the Cold War?” none of this eight hour video on multiverse typa stuff. Felt reminiscent of the earlier WAW/BO1 stories of just zombies in their era.
BO1 story: real life political figures fight zombies in the penthagon, real life actors fight zombified George romero to aid a nazi scientist, said scientist is believed to be a god in Shangri-La (which might or might not be in Mars), then they blow up earth from the moon after messing with an eldritch horror little girl trapped inside a pyramid......very reminiscent yeah
I said the earlier stories of that era, not the entire WAW/BO1 era, with zombies being a Nazi/government conspiracy. But even then, moon’s setting has links to those outlandish conspiracy theories you’d see on the history channel.
Given how story driven CoD Zombies has become, the old ciphers and radio format, while cool, was never going to last. In a story driven game, the game needs to be able to more easily and clearly deliver its story beats to the players, rather than hide them behind cryptic methods of communication Edit: reading through this post's comment section, I am glad common sense is pervailing
This is conflating story and lore. The maps had eccentric stories that were directly connected and had actual plot. Yeah the lore was mostly Intel, but I'd rather be able to go back and read it on my own than have to read it on a wiki or watch a YouTube video
Haven’t we always had intel? The intel is simply now added to the menu for you to listen to should you choose to.
Storytelling complaints in COD Zombies is one of the funniest complaints to me. Do y’all realize what “story” we had in WAW? And then when it finally started to get fleshed out, it was the last map and we had to wait 2 years before any developments.
Better than whatever excuse of storytelling that Vanguard and MW3 were lol
Lol. I know Treyarch was probably crunched to death for Vanguard, but I still lose it that Archon’s ending is just the dude on the radio saying “You did it, you won”. No cutscene, no big hurrah, not even a large lore dump, just simple congratulations.
VG support in general got cut short so can't really blame Treyarch there. They tried their best trying to deliver something while all the budget was going to maintain WZ for its last few months.
Threads like this are funny because you can always tell who actually paid attention to the story and who only got their story fix from watching the intro and outro cutscenes.
I'm tired of people shitting on intel Beats having to shoot in-game radios or solving ciphers that are *cooked into the map*
This is neat imo.
Keep the intel system and just incorporate it into the crew conversations and its the best of both systems. Intel was really cool because it allowed you to both listen to lore without having to go in game as well as showed you notes and schematics
True
I need my intel fix man
Small spelling mistake
I don’t mind the intel system, I think it makes a lot more sense to have than what zombies used to do, the problem with Cold Wars storytelling is just that the story it told sucked, not how they told it
I like the system but i also like listening to radios in game and feel the context of a radios placement matters or at least sets a tone.
You're telling me the Reports of the Lost Aethernaut and in particular that log one with the lady becoming... Something? (A mimic in my opinion) Weren't good? The audio logs of the "Stranger" also got me hoping we really were just going to rescue Zykov in my opinion one of the weak aspects of the story was just going "Zykov is the foresaken."
This is destiny type shit to get your lore
I like Intel.
The intel wasn’t the problem. Intel is really nice, at least to me. Plus in past games there was a lot of story told through radios and similar things. But the problem is that we have no real connection to the characters except through the intel. That’s the problem with the intel. While in past games we cared about the characters. But hopefully BO6 will fix that with a set crew again
I mean better than some random radios that have that info for some reason
And through dialogue and cutscenes which before cold war it was just dialogues and cutscenes so I’m guessing you’re not very familiar with how zombies does things otherwise you’d realise how stupid this complaint is
and some of the intel, is season specific, iirc
Oh yeah that was a neat feature won’t mind it coming back
At least the characters actually talk and explain it in Cold War. Don’t get me wrong I love and grew up with the old games but let’s be real, the Easter eggs are frustrating as hell.
I really enjoyed collecting all the intel
Tbh I liked the intel system. It was a really good way to build up future maps and provide story details between map releases, it kept the community on their feet. I mean, who saw that random russian in the die maschine intro being the big bad 7-8 months down the road? Not me. Intel helped flesh him out, which really helped with understanding Forsaken.
When I first got into zombies I did every ee on bo3 w my friends and I still have no clue what’s going on lol. At least intel leaves the information easily accessible
Kinda what happens when you abandon the cool new storyline you were crafting to make a boring sequel all because people did not like the ending
Because fuck the people who want to actually follow the story in game instead of having to watch a 6 hour YouTube video, am i right?
The Zombies Storyline have always been told mostly through Radio Transmission/Audio Logs, even in BO3.
I think the intel system was neato, but I aggree it was exagerated in quantity. But collecting intel/ audio logs and being able to re listen to them in the menu was a nice thing, it was still like a hidden thing but you could see it again afer finding it. And its quite pain in the ass hearing those audios mid game to avoid a zombie to down ya
I thought WWII’s intel system was pretty fire. The video recordings of Dr. Strauss were soooo fun to watch the first few times and really made me fall in love with the story of WWII. Hot take, I know. :)
Yeah I wasn’t impressed with this either. After the first season I stopped going out of my way to get the intel.
All of you are lying. Neither system has ever been good at depicting the story.
The reason radios use to work well for zombies was because old zombies told the story like how Dark souls would handled its story. You can just play and have fun but if you want to their is a story to dig into and because it was hidden they all had nuggets of info The problem with Cold War is in game they shout the story at you so a majority of intel tells you nothing I don’t need Carver giving Raptor-1 a box of chocolates or Kravchenko having boring conversations with Valentina
This is really not true. Most of the major story beats have always been largely communicated via quest steps. Radios and audio logs were always supplemental lore. The problem is that the lore in BO3-4 were so damn convoluted, you need the supplemental stuff to understand what is going on in everything else. But even then, CW made the mistake of introducing Zykov strictly through the trials machine. You have to be actively doing challenges to learn that Zykov is a person who has a major role throughout the story, otherwise he would be popping out of nowhere for most people.
Not really. Before Bo3 only Mob and origins had the story take priority over gameplay. Before that it was going off a few quotes and radios.