Treyarch may have found a way to welcome new players to Black Ops 6 Zombies without ruining Call of Duty's infamous Easter egg hunts

Thanks to a massive new intel drop, we now know a lot more about Black Ops 6 Zombies than we expected at this point in the year. The co-op mode looks to be an overhaul to many of the underlying systems, but it’s also keeping a few classic features intact.

Easter egg hunts; essentially hidden quests players have to figure out how to finish on their own, have been a staple of Zombies for years. Their obtuse nature, however, made them off limits to most casual players.

While past Zombies iterations have toyed around with different ideas to try and bring new players into that part of the game to varying degrees of success, Black Ops 6 may have a best-of-both-worlds solution.

In Black Ops 6’s Zombies mode, Easter eggs will obviously return. There’s also going to be a guided mode designed for new players, but the big change is that each map’s guided mode won’t be available at its launch, and will instead arrive later during the season.

This means that everyone will be in the dark about how to figure out the solution to these quests, which allows the community to work together to source discoveries for the main and side quests.

Guided mode is itself pretty interesting, offering “focused guidance” through the main quests, and the rounds are capped to certain stages to make it easier to progress. Side quests and Easter eggs, however, will be disabled in guided mode, making it essentially the best way to experience the narrative.

As always, you’ll earn themed rewards for completing a map’s main quest, and an extra reward for doing it outside of the guided mode. That also includes limited-time calling cards for doing the same prior to the launch of the guided mode.

Outside of these additions, and all the new quality of life features we covered earlier, Black Ops 6 Zombies brings back plenty of familiar mechanics and in-round systems. Pack-a-Punch, Mystery Boxes, and the various Cola perk machines are back - as are the GobbleGums.

It also keeps several mechanics introduced in Black Ops Cold War’s Zombies mode, such as Essence and Salvage being the two main currencies, the ability to Exfil and earn rewards when things become overwhelming, the crafting table and more.

At launch, Zombies will include two round-based maps. As revealed in the narrative trailer, the first takes place on Terminus Island, whereas the other is set in a West Virginia town called Liberty Falls. While this week’s blog post focuses entirely on Terminus, we’re going to have to wait for Call of Duty: Next later this month to learn about Liberty Falls.

Sadly, Zombies content won’t be part of the upcoming Black Ops 6 beta, but launch isn’t too far off. The full game arrives October 25 on PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S.