The Archon will take the players back to the deserts of Egypt, featuring a new multi-step main quest, wonder weapons, new side quests, and a full-fledged boss fight to end it all. The Archon is a round-based version of Terra Maledicta. After the successful reception of the Shi No Numa round-based map in Vanguard, Treyarch has allocated all its resources to providing the zombie fans one last round-based map before concluding the Vanguard Zombies chapter.
In the final chapter, the players will go against the deathless himself, Lord Kortifex. Before you confront Kortifex, however, you will be tasked with completing three challenges, including the Trials of Sacrifice, Resilience, and Mindfulness.
If you’ve been a fan of Call of Duty: Zombies, you’ll know this is a commonly recurring theme. We’ve also seen the extreme version of challenges on the Blood of the Dead map in Black Ops 4. According to Treyarch’s blog post, most of the focus was on the final boss fight with Kortifex, making it one of the most memorable boss fights in zombies history. Rather than spending resources on more covenants or additional features, the priority was given to the boss fight, to scale it to a never-seen-before level. Players can also wield not just one or two but three different Wonder Weapons on the same map. This includes the Ray Gun, the Wunderwaffe DG-2, and the Decimator Shield. The Decimator Shield received a lot of criticism and was quite frankly one of the most useless Wonder Weapons, until now.
The Decimator Shield cooldown has been reduced to 30 seconds. It was 90 seconds when it was first introduced, which was painfully slow. The Decimator Shield has also received a damage buff against Zaballa and Sturmkreigers, making the weapon more viable. The Altar of Covenant will also receive a much-needed update. The full selection of all three Covenants will refresh with each round instead of every three rounds. This will allow players to get their desired covenants and builds much faster. The question remains - what is the future of zombies? The answer to that lies within the blog post and a tweet by Treyarch. The developers have been really active in recruiting new talent and scaling their team for their next game, scheduled to release in 2024. We won’t have any more zombie content for the next two years, but this means the next iteration of zombies gets a full two-year development cycle.
This will help Treyarch learn from the criticism they’ve received from Cold War and Vanguard Zombies and improve upon them to deliver a truly remarkable zombies experience for 2024. It is clear that Outbreak and objective-based mode also has a large following, mainly the casuals. It is definitely here to stay, but that does not mean round-based won’t return. Shi No Numa and the upcoming map, The Archon, are proof of that. They’ve even said that the team is “the Zombies team stepping back into the shadows…for now” The Archon will go live on August 24th at 9 AM PT / 12 PM ET / 5 PM BST along with the main quest simultaneously. Stick around as we will have all the easter egg guides on our site. Meanwhile, why not check other zombie easter egg guides as you prepare for the arrival of The Archon?
