Kill_All_Monkeys

Playstation content always drops on Tuesdays, and my guess is that they'll release this on the 19th. Vonderhaar tweeted out that it was a very very early reveal so I think it will come out later January like usual. And I highly doubt this will see the light of day on last gen, I would also be very surprised if they did. The zombie map looks amazing, if anything it's for its atmosphere alone because that just looks like it's going to be classic zombies all the way. The new MP maps looks good, Hijack coming back though I don't know how I feel about because I played it so much in BO2. Most everyone else I talked to seems pleased by this though so I guess I can with it. Gauntlet looks interesting, I seems like it's a Freerun thing but I doubt that since that mode feels fairly complete on its own and I don't get the point of adding environments like that to it since all the other maps have been on giant floating black blocks, much less there being any demand for it at all. I'm guessing it's a new MP map that is trying out something new. Overall I would say this looks good so far, but I can already tell I will be playing this new zombies map until my bleed and then some. I'm sure everything else would be fun.

The only thing left I can suggest is having 4 players all lob every type of grenade and explosive equipment at it, if everyone has only tried throwing things at it with one or two players.

Maybe it requires the Wunderwaffe? It would make it good for something on this map.

I noticed one of my friends had an abnormally high round for solo on The Giant when previously it was about normal, along with SoE which is still at an average amount, as of this morning. Guess this explains it now.

I hate to admit it, but I think the truth is there is no real major EE in The Giant as is stated above. Sure there may be small things, but I think it's exactly as advertised. It was a bonus map meant to set up the story going forward with the DLC. There are already a lot of story heavy quotes spoken in the first 3 rounds by every character, and when playing co-op with other people, standing near them causes the characters to converse and I think that's really the extent of what the EE is. We learn some about what they've been up to and how there are multiple dimensions out there, and that's about it.

I'll be honest, I never really liked the guy. But I appreciate a good troll when I see one. I can just imagine all the know-it-all brats looking this up and being horribly disappointed in the end or just looking really stupid to more serious players like us.

Congratulations Tac! You deserve it! I wish I could've been more active as UotM, but a broken laptop for most of the month and playing the game non-stop said otherwise.

I do find myself playing the Giant far more than I do SoE, but that's mainly because I only play zombies with friends now and SoE is too tedious to play solo for me. I'm also enjoying the one true challenge I believe The Giant to have, and that is finding multiple spots to train around in. I know a lot of the classic training runs but I've never really liked having to run around a map to train, I prefer running a tight circle within a single room/area. Makes for an extra and sometimes truly challenging layer of difficulty.

The red trail I'm guessing is just a result of a lighting effect, as I'm pretty sure grenades (or any thrown equipment) leave a very faint trail when thrown and the lighting by that door might just affect opaque things such as that. The sound heard, if true, could mean something else as that is often a very common step in EEs to throw a grenade at something out of the map.

This is just glitch for sure, as I've seen them do that after using the "In plain sight gumball and just randomly for no reason at all.

I'm inclined to believe this to be some kind of glitch as I've seen it as blue a few times lately myself and it was in matches where I in no way did anything to search for an EE.

Usually the crying or some sort of noise made by people that is heard in zombies has some sort of spectral quality to it. This particular crying woman in The Giant sounds like she is right behind a wall, physically inside the map. It kind of threw me off when I first heard it and I thought someone was literally curled up underneath the stairs in the furnace room.

Huh, I totally forgot that from Origins. And I didn't even take the quote about 115 hallucinations into account. I just took that with Dempsey's quote about his memory starting to fade as the O4 slipping back into their former selves. So I guess it's just more of a interesting little connection to Origins and the ongoing story. Disappointed that it isn't really pointing to a larger EE in The Giant but it is a nice little throwback on its own.

I've always thought for a long time that we would one day get a "throw-back" map with the O4 from the WaW/BO days in a map taking place between some of those maps before Moon. Brazil would certainly make for an exotic place to visit, though I would imagine it will be hard to differentiate it from Shangri La.

So as I'm sure many of you have heard while playing as Ricthofen, and I don't know if this can only be heard in solo or not but so far it's the only time I hear it, he has a quote around when round 2 starts where he starts freaking out about what he needs to do and then tries to calm himself so he can focus on his objective. But during his brief panic he starts listing off things he needs to do such as "find a vessel for Maxis" and "open the gateway" (I think he said gateway). Doing the EE in The Giant so far activates a beacon of some sort to allow for Maxis to locate the O4. There is mention of a possible second beacon with the radios that could be a part of opening this gateway for Maxis, or maybe even something to do with the vessel for him. I just find it odd that he practically outlines what sounds like an EE we're used to right at the beginning of a match and all we do is the same brief EE from the original maps. I know they refer to this as a bonus map that more or less sets up the story going forward with the DLC maps, which is a neat idea but I was kind of a expecting a lot more from this map and the last trailer for it certainly alluded to as much. Also I apologize if I'm behind on anything already discovered in the map that points to a definitive yes or no to the continuation of the EE as my laptop breaking down literally the day before BO3 came out has really kind of kept me out of the loop more than I would've liked and I will be very happy to have it back soon.

Yeah I just like to think of it as pushing what we initially thought to be high rounds to get to even higher now.

I think it could possibly be Weasel, it was Nikolai's name he heard in MotD. Why did he hear that name specifically and none of the others? In making it out of MotD, I would assume with this name stuck in his head, he would've probably tried to have tracked it down obviously leading him to Russia, becoming aware of whatever artifacts he had the reporter retrieve. The Shadow Man aslo makes sense however as maybe he needed these 4 to kill trusted colleagues to awaken the curse mark and perform the rituals in SoE. Also those stories told by the reporter from the Old Man are very interesting, I think there was some heavy hinting at future maps there.

I was kind of expecting more from the new ranking system, but perhaps we'll see more added on to it later on during DLC season. By far though the biggest surprise to me is how much I love the new gobblegum system. To me it's s brilliant new addition to zombies that practically brings it own meta game to zombies before you even start a match. Good stuff. Weapon kits are very fun to mess around with. Though mostly cosmetic they add a deep layer of customization to zombies I have been craving for a while now. Makes everyone feel a little more unique. And I think I like the new difficultly, makes it harder for my nooby friends but we have fun so no harm done. I never thought I would like any changes to the core gameplay but I think they tweaked it just right. S/o the all the other cool features, as well as having the O4 back in their full glory. That never gets old.

I certainly will as soon as my laptop gets fixed. I literally can't wait to play it now.

Not exactly the same thing as the topic here but I had a weird glitch the other day where I tried to find a public match for a quick game and kept getting glitched out lobbies so I went into solo and while the cutscene was playing, I started hearing other people talk and ask if anybody else was somehow seeing the intro too. Then when the match itself started there were 3 of us in there. It was really weird.

I don't want to rush you but, I would very much like to get my hands on that map.

It's almost as if in zombies, no matter how much you change things some things stay the same.

It's almost like those who are from the Origins universe are trying to influence events in a manner similar to those who reside in the Aether, which I find to be a nice (possibly unintentional) little parallel.

I would be willing to bet my firstborn child that they will add a prestige or two with every DLC so that once many people will inevitably hit max prestige by the time DLC starts rolling out the new ranking system won't already be a useless feature.