Happy “115 Day” Call of Duty fans! You can earn Double XP from now through the 21st

Today is January 15th, which is known as “115 Day” for Call of Duty Zombies fans, and in honor of 115 Day, Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 players will receive Double XP in Zombies, Multiplayer, and Call of Duty: Warzone from now until January 21st, including a 2X GobbleGum earn rate, 2X player XP, 2X Weapon XP, and 2X Battle Pass XP. You can learn more via this blog or below:

Treyarch celebrates the Zombies community on one of our favorite days of the year.

115 Day is Here!

January 15 has arrived once again, AKA “115 Day” for our long-time Zombies fans, and we’ve got plenty of goodies to share this year. (Apologies in advance to our international friends for whom “1/15” makes no sense as a date. We don’t make the rules.)

While everyone at the studio is heads-down on polishing new content for Season 02 and working with teams across the franchise to improve various aspects of the game (more on that soon), we’re taking a moment today to celebrate the Zombies community and share some sneak peeks at what we’ve been cooking up.

In honor of 115 Day, we’re dropping the Black Ops 6 version of a Quad Feed for six days so everyone can load up on GobbleGums and maybe hit that next Prestige before Season 02 drops. Now live through 10 AM PT on January 21:

• 2X GobbleGum earn rate
• 2X Player XP
• 2X Weapon XP
• 2X Battle Pass XP

The Tomb Arrives with Season 02

Let’s just get this out of the way: we’re launching our next Zombies map in less than two weeks. Surprise! Just after the release of Citadelle des Morts in Season 01 Reloaded, The Tomb drops at the start of Season 02 on January 28.

After surviving the horrific events at Citadelle des Morts, Weaver, Grey, Carver, and Maya follow Gabriel Krafft’s final words to a nearby excavation site to secure the Sentinel Artifact. Built on the remains of ancient burial grounds with suspected origins dating back to 2500 B.C.E., these catacombs went undisturbed for centuries until the early 1900s… and what lies beneath may run deeper than anyone ever imagined.

As the rumors have it, a British archeologist by the name of Sir Archibald Fotherington-Smythe conducted an excavation at the site back in 1908 with grand expectations. Although no one can say for sure what became of him, a handful of photographs from his doomed expedition have recently surfaced…

We’ve crafted The Tomb to provide an experience similar to Liberty Falls (by far our most-played Zombies map in recent years!), featuring tighter play spaces with a focus on replayability. Just like in Liberty Falls, we’re delivering plenty of side Easter Eggs and even a reimagined Wonder Weapon inspired by our past. That’s all we’ll say about that for now.

As a reminder, every Zombies map in Black Ops 6 is an original location built from the ground-up for the mode… but that doesn’t mean we can’t enjoy a wink and a nod here and there. On that note, we’re going for something a little more evocative with our Pack-a-Punch camos this time around – and what if we told you one of the most iconic SMGs in Zombies history was coming along for the ride?

Stay tuned for more details on the gameplay content coming to The Tomb and Zombies overall in next week’s Season 02 reveal blog. Until then…

The Tomb OST Awaits

Just in time for the new map’s release, Treyarch’s own metal maestro Kevin Sherwood and the rest of the audio team are hard at work finalizing the original soundtrack for The Tomb. Keep an ear out for a full album of insanity at the end of the month.

Like many of you, we have fond memories from back in the day when we used to tease the next Zombies map’s Easter Egg song in some pretty fun ways. This time around, you won’t need to hit the game over screen for a quick hit of what’s waiting for you in The Tomb. Any guesses on who our guest vocalist could be?

Season 02 Quality-of-Life Preview

There’s plenty more coming to Zombies in Season 02, including a fresh batch of quality-of-life updates that the team has prioritized. Here’s a preview:

• Challenge Tracking & Near Completion (Zombies and Multiplayer)
  • Manually track up to 10 Calling Card Challenges and 10 Camo Challenges per mode to easily keep track of Challenges you’re progressing.
  • If you have less than 10 Calling Card Challenges or 10 Camo Challenges tracked, your nearest Challenges to completion will display in those slots instead. This should help players discover and identify Challenges they are close to completing.
  • The top Tracked or Near Completion Calling Card Challenge and Camo Challenge both appear in the Lobby, as well as in-game via the Options Menu.
• Co-op Pause
  • In matches where everyone is in the same party, the party leader will now be able to pause the game for everyone to regroup on strategy or take a snack break during those high-round runs. We know this one’s been requested since launch, and we’re excited to get it in with S02.
• AFK Kick Loadout Recovery
  • If a player gets kicked for going AFK in a co-op game, now their loadout, Essence, and Salvage will be restored after they rejoin.
• Separate HUD Presets for Zombies and Multiplayer
  • At last, you’ll be able to set up the HUD Preset settings you prefer for Zombies and keep an entirely different setup for MP without having to change them between modes.
  • We wanted to get this one in sooner, but the team needed to refocus on higher priorities as they came up.

Directed Mode Stats

Fun fact: as of today, players have put in over 480 million hours into Black Ops 6 Zombies. Seriously. Yet despite that frankly staggering statistic, our total Main Quest completion rate across both Zombies launch maps hadn’t cracked 4% before the release of Directed Mode. Starting on November 14, that all changed.

Our goal from the start for Directed Mode was simple: grow the Zombies community by guiding new players through the Main Quests with some guardrails in place, so they can experience the storyline and hopefully become lifelong Zombies fans. Thankfully, the numbers are promising! Since Directed Mode went live, our average Main Quest completion rate has more than doubled, going from 3.38% on November 14 to 8.23% today.

This still means over 90% of people who’ve played Zombies haven’t completed a Main Quest yet, so our mission continues… but we’re proud of these initial results, and excited to welcome so many new players into the fold with this new feature. Onward and upward!

Fun with Pack-a-Punch Names

And now, a note from the Design department:

“Adding weapons into Zombies can be a lot of work. Aside from the basic setup that every weapon has just to get into the game, Zombies enhances it even further with the process we know and love as Pack-a-Punching. For over a decade now, you can take your weapon to the Pack-a-Punch machine and pay a hefty fee to give it a super science enhancement. Pack-a-Punch is so powerful, it can be used as a noun, verb, and an adjective! After an enhancement like that, it wouldn’t seem right to call your weapon by the same old name, so it’s lovingly given a distinct PaP name by the team.

After all the setup, tuning, and playtesting is done, it’s time to find a name that will embody the spirit of the newly enhanced weapon, or one that might make you chuckle. There’s no one way to name a weapon, and in fact, we find it’s best to mix it up so they don’t feel too samey. In the past, names have used things like leetspeak, mythology, game lore, super science-y backronyms, god-tier puns, or even something that just sounds cool… to us, at least.

Sometimes the PaP name is a little esoteric and you may not know what the significance of it is. So today, we’ll peel back the curtain and show you exactly where a handful of the BO6 PaP names came from.”

• Tanto .22 becomes the Kubikiri. A tanto is a Japanese short sword, and a type with the blade on the inside curve was used for kubikiri, to cut the heads off dead enemies for trophies. Badass.
• Goblin Mk2 becomes Ogre Mk XII. (“What’s stronger than a goblin? Oh yeah, and make the number bigger.”)
• AS Val becomes AS If, which was popular slang in the 1990s. Hopefully some of you have actual memories of this.
• Jackal PDW becomes the Embalmer JNPW. Anubis is the god of funerary rites, such as embalming. He has the head of a jackal, and JNPW is one way to write his name in Ancient Egyptian.
• GS45 becomes Sally & Forth. A relative of the OG duo from Black Ops 1, these 45s sally forth to meet the enemy head on!
• Marine SP becomes the Bakunawa. The Bakunawa is a mythical Phillipine moon dragon.
• XM4 becomes Xyster Meister, a backronym and a new name. Sometimes weapons that have appeared in previous Zombies games will get a new, similar name to reflect different tunings.
• XMG becomes Xenon Matter Granulator. Another backronym, related to the XM4’s Xeno Matter from BO4, since the weapon is in the same family of “XM” weapons. If you didn’t know, now you do.
• AK-74 becomes Rasputin’s Rebuke, another in a series of “Rasputins” (it’s hard to get rid of the guy).
• GPR 91 becomes Geomyidae 41. Geomyidae is the scientific name for a GoPheR. This one’s a pretty deep cut.
• Tsarkov 7.62 becomes Tsarkophagus KV62. Tsarkov is the root word of Tsarkophagus, and we’re not being Tsarkastic!
• AEK-973 becomes AOK 5×5. “A-okay, five by five” means you’re receiving a clear radio signal.
• Cigma 2B becomes Ornot 2B. 2B Ornot 2B? That is the question.
• HE-1 becomes H3-15-H1M. He’s him!
• PU-21 becomes DK Phthisis. Phthisis is the personification of rot and decay. Another deep biology cut.
• Grakhova becomes Kraka & Toa. Krakatoa isn’t just a caldera in Indonesia, you know.
• ASG-89 becomes Munmu’s Protection. King Munmu wished to become a dragon to protect his people. This shotgun can use Dragon’s Breath to protect you. Boom.
• SVD becomes Shadow Veil Demon. Like a shot out of nowhere. (Also just a badass name.)
• Thrustodyne Model 23 becomes Scramjet Model 3200. A scramjet is a powerful type of jet engine, much like this reimagined Wonder Weapon.
• DR-11 Beamsmasher becomes Supersonic Crusher, using sound and light to penetrate your soul!

Welcome Home, Abby

Call of Duty NEXT 2024 feels like just yesterday, and depending on who you ask around here, our life-sized, smoke-breathing, Guinness World Record-breaking Abomination was the star of the show.

After trucking across the country from D.C. to LA, spending a few months comfortably in storage, and being carefully hoisted piece-by-piece through our bay windows, our girl Abby is now safely home with us at the studio.

Here she is in all her glory, supported by an extremely sturdy steel beam:

Thank You

Before we wrap things up… thank you for the well-wishes during these ongoing wildfires that have impacted the lives of so many of our colleagues, friends, and family members here in Southern California.

These are truly unprecedented times, and the full scope of the damage is still unfolding. Many of the worst-affected areas are mere miles from our studios and there’s no predicting when these fires can be fully contained. Our hearts go out to everyone whose lives have been changed forever by this tragedy.

This, too, shall pass.

And with that – thank you from everyone here at Treyarch. Thanks for playing with us for all these years, thanks for your creativity and contributions, and thanks for helping to make Zombies into something truly special from humble beginnings.

Stay safe, take care of yourselves, and we’ll see you online.

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