To celebrate the spooky Halloween season, Call of Duty has a new event called The Haunting, which is live right now, that comes as a sequel to last year’s Halloween event where players fondly remember playing as a zombie in Warzone and enjoying Verdansk at night.
Last year’s event was well-liked, so the hype was there for this update, but how has it actually turned out? In this article, we’ll explain everything you need to know about Call of Duty’s Season 6 event The Haunting.
The Haunting has come to Warzone and Black Ops Cold War, with updates coming to both zombies and multiplayer in Cold War. The event runs through November 2nd, 2021, while Season 6 runs until December 2nd, 2021. Call of Duty: Vanguard launches midway through Season 6 on November 5th, 2021.
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Warzone has a new mode called Ghosts of Verdansk, while Cold War has the new modes Scream Deathmatch, Infected, and Nuketown ‘84 Halloween, which is more of a map than a mode as it’s just Nuketown 24/7 on the Halloween version of the Nuketown ‘84 map with the added possibility of playing Prop Hunt.
Zombies in Cold War gets a Hallow’s Eve Outbreak mode alongside some festive, Halloween-themed changes to zombies. They might not be the biggest changes, but the updates to zombies for The Haunting event have some surprising features.
Alongside these new modes, the LAPA SMG was added to Cold War and new blueprints and unlockables were added as rewards for completing the in-game challenges of The Haunting event. Plus, Donnie Darko and Ghostface from Scream were added in bundles you can purchase from the store alongside a slew of other bundles, too.
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This follows Call of Duty’s recent trend of pop culture tie-ins, like the Rambo and Bruce Willis skins alongside Nakatomi Plaza that came to Warzone earlier in the year. The Scream tie-in likely comes as marketing for the new Scream film simply titled Scream set to release in January of 2022.
So, how do these modes play? Unfortunately, reception for The Haunting update this year has been mixed. In Warzone, last year’s update was popular, so many had big hopes for Ghosts of Verdansk.
The new mode seems to build on what made the last event so great by adding in new mechanics, changes to map and gameplay flow, and upping the ante on the spookiness of it all. But for many, Ghosts of Verdansk simply doesn’t play that well.
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Ghosts are easy to take out, especially as a new kali sticks meta forms around the mode. Players simply change their loadouts to include this melee weapon so they can body ghosts with ease when they get close without having to struggle to switch to their weapon or hit a fast-moving target with a point blank spray.
While it can be a fun mode to joke around in, beyond a couple of matches, the mode largely doesn’t seem to have legs to make people want to keep playing it. The same can be said for the new modes added to Cold War, too.
Scream Deathmatch takes the idea of Michael Myers or hide and seek and runs with it. Two killers are chosen at the start of each round and given infinitely refilling two-hit-kill tomahawks as well as knives, while survivors have no weapons and are tasked with simply avoiding the killers. Once it’s down to the final survivor, they’re given a machete, which is also a two-hit kill, and a Spy Plane goes up.
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Every so often, each survivor lets out a scream which functions like Prop Hunt’s whistling: it alerts killers to where survivors are hiding and encourages people to stay on the move. All of this sounds good, but the major problem is that killers almost always win.
Killers move as fast or slightly faster than survivors while having both melee and ranged options to take out the survivors who cannot fight back until there’s only one left, so unless you find a particularly incapable killer or roll a map with options for amazing hiding places, you’re mostly just sitting around waiting to die.
Again, this can be a fun change of pace with friends, but most Cold War players seem to be playing the mode a few times and then moving on to other things. This also applies to Infected but does so slightly less as Infected is a reasonably popular, classic party game mode in Call of Duty.
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Treyarch’s spin on the mode doesn’t include a tactical insertion, which has proven to be a key way for infected to keep things interesting and surprise survivors, so it’s much more of a kill chamber than it was in games with tactical insertion as a part of the infected loadout.
The community is generally pleased this mode makes an appearance in Cold War, but like the event’s other modes, since it doesn’t play as well as it could, most seem to jump in for a while, get their fill, and move on from it.
Nuketown ‘84 Halloween is more Nuketown, and before the update went live, Nuketown 24/7 wasn’t an available playlist as Nukejacked was being offered, so players are generally happy to have the Nuketown playlist back that doesn’t force them to play Hijacked, but the changes to Nuketown aren’t that substantial.
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The biggest change to Zombies isn’t that big depending on who you are, but if you’re looking for a good way to level guns or grind camos, there is good news. Added to zombies are Jack O’Lantern drops, which randomly give the player a reward that can include free Pack-a-Punch upgrades to any tier as well as weapon damage upgrades of any tier.
When you combine this with the new Forsaken map added in Season 6 that has a starting area you can farm zombies in infinitely as well as rounds that go by quickly, leveling up guns and unlocking zombies camos is easier than it has been in a long time.
Since the event runs until November 2nd, setting aside some time to grind zombies is well worth the effort if you’re interested in unlocking Dark Aether or you simply need to level up a bunch of guns for use in multiplayer or Warzone.
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