Black Ops Cold War is Re-Introducing Nuketown

Black Ops Cold War is bringing back the eternal favorite Nuketown, and while it isn’t seeing any significant changes, it’s still a pretty big deal.

While the game has only been out for just under two weeks, it’s already seen a couple of updates and today brings a new map as well as double XP across the board.

Nuketown ’84, the newest version of the map, isn’t going to see any changes to the layout of the map, other than having graffiti and being a bit worse for wear than the original, meaning anyone who’s played the previous Black Ops titles will be intimately familiar with the returning map.

The biggest perks of the new addition are the double XP that will be running until November 30^th, and the weapon blueprint. The blueprint is nothing special, a Hauer 77 shotgun blueprint that has its own custom skin and the same attachments you could add, just reskinned to fit the theme. It also brings the first weapon ornaments and stickers, although compared to the offerings from last year’s Modern Warfare, you probably wouldn’t be alone in passing on using them.

The double XP is what has me the most excited. I’m a fairly casual player, not having enough time to sit down and play for six or more hours a day until I’ve got everything unlocked, although it probably doesn’t help that I’ve been playing almost exclusively zombies since the game came out. I’m sitting at level 32 currently, with maybe a quarter of the attachments unlocked for the XM4, which I’ve been using pretty much the entire time in multiplayer.

The slow XP gain for both player level and weapon level isn’t something I’ve chimed in on before now, and I won’t have a truly good grasp on it until after tomorrow, but my immediate reaction is that it’s going to feel a lot better as an Xbox player to level up and generally play the game with the double XP active.

I know zombies isn’t the most effective way to level up, but I just enjoy it more than multiplayer or Warzone. It doesn’t feel great leveling up once (if I’m lucky) in a 20+ round game of zombies, and it feels even worse once I realize I gained maybe two weapon levels for anything I was using, especially since I could make the same gains in one or two matches of multiplayer.

As far as Nuketown ’84, I’m excited. The map is small and familiar and should lead to more action throughout the game. More importantly, it’s going to seriously handicap snipers since the map is so small and the spawns flip so frequently. While snipers aren’t as obnoxiously strong as they were in the beta or before their recent nerf, it’s still frustrating to play on maps like Miami or Satellite and see nothing but a sea of sniper scope glints in the distance before watching another kill cam.

I doubt the new map will do much for my general interest in multiplayer, especially with the obnoxious skill-based matchmaking still strongly in effect, but if nothing else it’ll be good for a few rounds of mindless fun between games of zombies where I’m the only one still standing by the end of round 22.