If you like a bit of Nazi zombie slaying, Zombie Army 4: Dead War is available on Xbox Game Pass right now. We’re also working hard on Season Pass 3, and the first round of content has gone live – so I’d like to give you a little “behind the scenes” on everything we’ve announced so far!
Each season features a mix of free and paid content. Free to everyone with the base game, we’ve finally finished Nightmare Mode – which we’ve been working on since before the core game launched! This difficulty setting strips out the story and turns the game into a sequence of insanely hard combat puzzles for 1-2 players. We discovered that this wasn’t as straightforward as upping the enemy count – groups of elite enemies didn’t always make things harder if you could grab their heavy weapons and mow everyone else down! Our level designers have had to work hard to get as mischievous as possible.
All players also have access to a new horde map, Frozen in Fear, set in the Resistance base found in Season 2’s Alpine Blitz (which also features in the tie-in novel, Fortress of the Dead). When we built the base we discovered that while the level flow worked well for the story, it didn’t use the whole base. As such, we had the idea of setting a horde map in the aftermath of a zombie zeppelin attack and letting players escape the ruins through a new path. With a battle-damaged base and fleshed out surrounding areas, the play experience is very different.
Players that pick up the Season 3 Pass will gain access to the main content of the Season – a new story campaign. In Season 3, we’ve decided to open up the zombie killing experience in wide open sandbox maps, to reflect the game’s origin as a horror themed alternate timeline to Sniper Elite. The new mission, Terminal Error, is a huge open base containing an occult Nazi supercomputer. The base itself is a kind of Easter Egg for Sniper Elite 4 fans, but the play experience is wildly different.
A reference point for us the atmosphere of an abandoned theme park, where the story objectives lock players in ghost houses. It has also been a great opportunity to grow some plot threads from Season 1 and 2 into a larger scale story, getting deeper into the occult scheme that undead Hitler was only a small part of.
Season 3 will also give players access to a range of character outfits, weapons, weapon skins, charms and hats. We’ve covered a wide range of content to let our WW2 history and pulp-horror fans find what they like.
As part of the first content drop is the M1934 pistol, a solid all-rounder that players can upgrade to feature a nice, deep clip. The first round of cosmetic items features the “Marie Undercover” outfit, Zombie-themed hats and charms (for players who think the dead look cool and want to match), and Elemental skins for the weapons from the base game – a perfect fit for players that have upgraded their gun to unleash elemental damage.
There is much more on the roadmap that we’re working on right now, including more unannounced freebies, and we hope you enjoy what’s in store during Season 3!
Zombie Army 4: Dead War
Rebellion
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