As a special bank holiday treat, PlayStation EU confirmed that the 2017 entry in the series, which boasts a single-player, multiplayer, and zombies mode, will be part of the instant game collection next month and promised that we’ll find out what will be joining it later this week.

PS Plus members, Call of Duty: WWII is part of the monthly games lineup for June and will be available for download starting 26th May.We’ll share additional details of our monthly lineup later this week. Enjoy! pic.twitter.com/jg9yJmF6aGMay 25, 2020

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Considering that Call of Duty Warzone is one of the biggest games in the world right now, it’ll be another free dose of COD for those who fancy a more retro-take on the series’ signature style of snappy shooting. At the very least, it’ll probably be a nice break away from the squads who are breaking kill records (opens in new tab) in the battle royale right now.  

Call of Duty WW2 (opens in new tab) is certainly one of the highlights for the series this generation. Back in his original review for GamesRadar, guides co-ordinator Leon Hurley said the shooter “delivers a well rounded package with multiplayer benefiting most from a clearer palette of gear and options that make maps and clashes more accessible and enjoyable than they’ve been in years.” 

Don’t forget, this means that time is running out if you haven’t yet picked up May’s free PlayStation Plus games, which are Cities: Skyline and Farming Simulator 19. You might need relaxing games like those after you COD: WW2 to your collection next month. 

Can’t get enough Call of Duty? Here’s what we know about this unannounced year’s entry so far, Call of (opens in new tab) Duty 2020.

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Disaster movies are almost as old as the medium itself. The genre that began at the turn of the 20th century with movies like the silent short drama Fire! from 1901 blossomed in the 1970s, when high-budget features like Airport, Earthquake and The Towering Inferno charmed audiences with their mix of edge of the seat suspense and expensive special effects. While, more often than not, disaster movies tackle imaginary cataclysms, movie studios are quick to capitalize on one of humanity’s most primal fears – facing the wrath of nature. So why aren’t video game publishers as keen?

On paper, nature sounds like the ultimate video game villain: unrelenting, unstoppable, unpredictable and absolutely devastating. But dropping the comfort of the supernatural when crafting a video game apocalypse (ditching zombies, mutants, aliens etc) isn’t that easy or common.

The forces of nature

Disaster Report – released as SOS: The Final Escape in the West – is a Japanese PlayStation 2 title which strands the player in a city freshly ravaged by an earthquake. It makes perfect sense that Japanese developers, faced with the reality of living on top of a tectonic line, make a game dealing with the aftermath of an earthquake. But while most games deal with the dystopian, societal consequences of various cataclysms (Ubisoft’s I Am Alive springs to mind), Disaster Report drops us in the heart of the aftershock stricken action. Disaster Report is not a great game by any stretch of the imagination, and its plot inevitably takes a turn for the kitschy, but it accomplishes at least one important feat: it strips the apocalyptic scenario of supernatural elements, casting the cataclysm and people caught in it as villains. Among the few games that followed in its path, the indie darling The Long Dark stands out as the one that learned its lessons best. 

There’s little doubt video games can tackle fictional, imaginary disasters, and build interesting gameplay around them. So, why don’t more developers go that route? Perhaps out of fear that players wouldn’t enjoy their games. We’re accustomed to winning in games, and winning big. Saving planets, rescuing princesses. In a story about a natural disaster, it’s almost impossible to create heroes… most are just survivors. This begs the question: is barely surviving reward enough for investing long hours into a game? Modern games have found in niche in roguelikes, where surviving as long as possible and restarting is the core appeal, but few truly go mainstream because players love to win.

Some could also argue that video games are about escapism and many are designed to make us forget about the real world, to turn us into heroes. Other games, however, like to comment on how rotten the outside world is, and they’re almost always hard to play. Games like The Last of Us manage to mix the two approaches and entertain us while telling a grim story of humanity’s literal and moral downfall, but it’s intensely depressing. It’s the story of Ellie and Joel facing the end of the world together with no prospect of winning. Does the cause of the apocalypse matter at all? Skilled professionals such as Naughty Dog could easily replace the fungus infected quasi-zombies with a more immediate, believable, natural threat and build a game at least as gripping as The Last of Us… but would a publisher be comfortable signing off on a title with no obvious ‘villain’ or evil?

Real world problems

Then there’s the question of whether games are capable of handling the tales of real disasters in a tasteful manner. Building graceful and respectful narratives around the deaths of innocent people would be uncharted territory for a medium unproven in being graceful or respectful. We have no way of knowing how the world would react to, say, a game about the September Mexico City earthquakes, but the idea of retelling a famous (albeit hardly caused by natural forces) disaster story through video games isn’t a brand new one.

Announced in 2015 by  Polish studio Jujubee, Kursk tackles the sinking of the eponymous nuclear Russian submarine which perished with all 118 of its crew in the depths of the Barents sea in 2000. “Kursk will definitely be a game for mature audiences looking for a unique and cinematic experience,” Jujubee’s CEO Michal Stepien said. But he failed to convince everyone that a game about Kursk is a good idea. “It’s too soon”, some said. Others questioned whether “the new angle” the devs touted holds any promise of telling the tragic story in a tasteful manner. Another common accusations against Jujubee suggested that Kursk is trying to piggyback the famous tragedy for publicity. It’s not a natural disaster, but it’s a good example of how the world reacts to video games imitating real life tragedy.

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How The Long Dark got Early access right (opens in new tab)

Unsurprisingly, the announcement of Kursk caused the biggest outrage in Russia. As quoted by The Moscow Times, some commenters floated the concepts of games about the terrorist attacks of 9/11, or ‘Katyn: Shoot the Polish Officer,’ referencing the mass murder of 20,000 Polish officers by NKVD in 1940. The controversy did little to help the game. Two and a half years later, Kursk remains nowhere to be seen without as much as a placeholder release date and no other game since dared to follow in its wake.

While the outrage against Kursk was at least partially fueled by the rocky historical relationship between Poland and Russia, the case of Kursk illustrates the widespread sentiment that video games aren’t a medium mature enough to tackle matters as serious as tragedies claiming dozens, hundreds, even thousands of lives. Unless, of course, we’re talking about tragedies claiming millions of lives: wars. 

The argument that the idea of turning a tragedy of unimaginable scale into a money-generating product (be it a game, a movie or a book) is inherently in bad taste collapses under the weight of trigger happy war games like Call of Duty, Medal of Honor and their less successful imitators.

What makes war different and so easily adaptable into a video game? War can be ended, avoided, even understood. Natural disasters can’t. War draws a clear line between the bad guys (them) and the good guys (us). But most of all, war is manmade. We know who to blame for it and where to seek redemption, even if that’s heavily subject to personal perspective. Natural disasters don’t offer the same comfort. 

Perhaps the real barrier right now is that a convincing natural disaster game would take a lot of work. The need to craft an entire world as an enemy, and to have it all act realistically is a hell of a challenge. And maybe that’s the real answer to why video games tend to steer clear of cataclysmic events: cost and resources. For a movie, it’s a matter of some expensive CG and some choice location shooting… but the experience is still passive and doesn’t need to ‘behave’ consistently. With games, the force of nature is a hard, hard thing to simulate. Morally, that’s probably a happy coincidence, but the upshot is that – spectacular as it may be – we’re unlikely to see a natural disaster game any time soon.

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“One of the War maps is Operation Neptune and that’s D-Day,” Condrey says. “You will play D-Day from the Axis perspective; you’ll begin by having to hold the Allies off the beach, and I don’t think anyone’s ever seen that before, let alone played that before.”

It definitely sounds interesting, but also like that particular War Mode campaign could attract the worst possible people for all the wrong reasons. Fun twist on the usual historical perspective, or troll’s dumpster fire? Only time will tell. It’s worth noting that Call Of Duty WW2 doesn’t have an Axis single-player campaign, which is probably for the best.

“We love traditional multiplayer, obviously, the fan favorite modes are still super fun,” says Condrey of the new mode. “But War does play out in a very different way, and with custom maps and these asymmetrical experiences, we can put you in places that a traditional map just wouldn’t allow. And we can allow you to see the conflicts from both sides, from the Ally and the Axis perspectives.”

Call Of Duty WW2 will be released on PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC on November 3.

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“There are things that you can do in Headquarters that give you rewards: you can earn XP, you can earn cosmetic rewards, you can earn buffs and bonuses like double XP for doing a bunch of little challenges and things,” he says. 

“We know we have a great community, [and] our offering to date has largely been about the competitive space – how do you do competitive – but our Headquarters is meant to be about the other aspect, the social aspect, rewarding people for being social.”

Introverts beware – as well as worrying about your kill/death ratio, you’ll now want to keep an eye on your Call Of Duty WW2 social score too. “A KD is your competitive score; social score is about how much you contribute to the community, so people can commend you for doing cool things,” says Condrey. “You can rank up your social score and get rewarded just for hanging out and being a good member of the community.” 

There will be other perks as well, even just for being there when people are opening up the new loot boxes. “If you open your supply drops (all of our loot is cosmetic this year, so it’s just about character customization) and get something really cool, there’s a chance people watching you open your supply drop will also get something cool.” Basically, prepare to have a lot of folks look at you all thirsty whenever you want to open up a loot box. 

Read the full interview with Condrey tomorrow on GamesRadar+.

Call Of Duty WW2 will be released on PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC on November 3. 

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 How Call of Duty: WW2’s zombies mode is different 

 “We’re going back to our roots,” Horsley begins while valiantly refraining to mention boots on the ground. “It’s back to World War 2, in a gritty, realistic portrayal of the setting. We’re part of that universe, we’re part of the darkest corner of that universe so our charter was to have the scariest zombie mode ever. And everything we did was in service of that, the setting, the story, the zombie design, audio design, visuals. I think you can see a little bit of that in the trailer. We play the game all the time of course, and I still get scared. I still get caught. So it finally did pay off and I think we’ve got a really scary game.”

Dayton said these are a different breed of zombies, as well: “So many other stories have explored the biological, viral, infectious plague element of the story and we wanted to see, what if these were zombies that were constructed? What if they were engineered and built as weapons as war? And then of course we’ve got this wonderful backdrop of World War 2 and military forces that might just do that sort of thing. And so it allowed us to sort of re-tell the zombie story in our own way, with our own flavor. […] We’ve had to really dissect the science of scaring somebody and try to deliver different types of fear potentially in different ways.”

Is Call of Duty: WW2’s zombies mode really that scary?

“I think this is, without a doubt, the scariest version of Zombies that you will have ever seen,” Dayton says. “It’s the perfect storm of technology, and studio talent, and an audience that I just think is ready for something that is going to scare the hell out of them. And I think it is something that I’m going to recommend, for first-time players, do not turn the lights off.”

“It’s unpredictable, you don’t know where you’re gonna be, or what way you’re gonna be, and where your friends are,” Horsley says. “And so we had to make sure the experience was compatible with that. And it’s really interesting, we have the characters themselves – their vocalizations reflect their level of fear. So you hear them getting scared, you’re scared, your friends get scared. It’s infectious, I guess, fear’s infectious. I didn’t know that.”

Is Call of Duty: WW2 zombies scary enough to make a grown man shriek in a room full of huge strangers?

Yes.

“We’ve had some people come through the studio and see what we’re working on, and we had some members of a certain professional sports team come through,” Dayton begins, laughing. “And they were big fans of the zombie mode, and I was trying to be cool and show off the latest element that we just opened up. And so I’m kind of half talking to them, half looking, and I turn around and a zombie busts out of the window right in front of me. I shriek like I’m 12 years old and bump back into this enormous sports player, and I lost all professional dignity at that point. But I was like, okay, that’s the game we’re making.”

Can we play Nacht der Untoten again?

“Since we hit the reset button on this, we’re keeping it all within our own universe,” Dayton says. 

Horsley brings down the sledgehammer on any tie-in theories once and for all: “It’s all original, unique IP. It doesn’t really have any connection to any other things.”

But that’s not to say there won’t be some more good, old-fashioned mysteries to unravel.

Will Call of Duty: WW2 zombies have Easter eggs and other mysteries?

Sledgehammer isn’t just rethinking the zombies themselves, it’s also taking some new approaches to unraveling the mysteries that dedicated players crave.

“The way we can bury mystery and have story that hints at deeper, darker things going on,” Dayton says. “We have some testers who are hardcore players. These are the people that spend their weekends digging into these zombie maps. And there’s still territory they’ve not uncovered. There are still mysteries they’ve not come to. And it’s hard to keep those secrets when in the studio, but it’s so fun to see what clues they’re unraveling and how they’re getting towards it, because we want to deliver that exciting, mysterious, sleuthing experience.”

Read our Call of Duty: WW2 (opens in new tab) recap article and watch the first full Call of Duty: WW2 Zombies trailer (opens in new tab) to learn more about the undead menace.

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