How Shadows of Evil was both Misstep and Masterpiece (2024)

Shadows Of Evil. The map where I have no clue what to do. I don't think I've ever even seen that Pack-A-Punch fight with the Shadow Man. I just train zombies right outside that door and eventually it's open.

When you uploaded this video yesterday it was also both a misstep and a masterpiece

Funny to think that shadows of evil suffered a reverse tranzit, a lot hated the map at the start, then the more they played it, the more they started to actually enjoy it and see how great the map was. I was one of those who hated shadows then started to love it

Can't forget that on launch, we were playing an especially unrefined version of the map that wasn't quite balanced to near-perfection and quality of life features like we see now.
The map on-launch was particularly awful to play with randoms (how many of us were playing due to the disconnect between generations and the lack of friends who owned the latest and greatest consoles). Ritual times were ridiculously slow unless all 4 players were present in the room. Ritual items were also player-specific and could only be held one at a time, meaning only the one who picked it up could place it down on its respective table. This meant that nearly every public match, you'd have a clueless random or an intentional troll with no mic/communication stumble along and pick up one of the items, leaving it forever in their inventory and soft-locking everyone else out of pack-a-punch and progressing the map.
And as mentioned in the video, the only other, simple map option was The Giant, a remaster of Der Riese locked behind an extra $50 paywall (much later on, they made the map available for a $5 purchase, but that was far too late, as the remaining community was pretty much just those accustomed to the more complex nature of zombies or already owned the season pass). So bo3 zombies, at launch, was a pretty miserable experience for most of us. I desperately wanted to enjoy the gamemode, as I was still on the bo2 high, but SOE was damn near unplayable unless you had a plethora of YT tutorials and very competent friends on the current console generation.
It is amazing in retrospect though, nowadays I regard bo3 as objectively the best game for zombies. Even Shadows in its modern state makes it to my top 5 or top 10 at the bare minimum. But back in 2015, I struggled to accept bo3 as anything but the start of the downfall for zombies, and one of the most dissapointing gameplay experiences ever.

Absolutely amazing video. Perfectly reflects how I feel about Shadows. It's an absolutely fantastic map, but it's also overwhelming for people that aren't coming in hot off the tails of something like Mob or Origins. Really I think the casual audience would have been much kinder if The Giant had launched alongside it to appeal to their needs.

No matter how many Shadows of Evil video essays I've seen, ima always click on a new one🤣

dude what you said about the setting change was on the money. I remember being so outraged by the shift in setting. I think it was just so unexpected and not really eased into either. BAM! now the entire world is tentacles. Especially when everyone was wanting answers for how Origins ended. Should not have been the map on disc.

Fantastic series.
I played Nacht, Shi No Numa, Der Riese and Kino and then took a decade break from zombies (stopped playing CoD entirely, but saw occasional videos), so these videos have been fascinating for me to slowly go through the journey. What sets these retrospectives apart is not only the detail, but the weighting of both the casual and hardcore audience. I distinctly remember looking at Shadows on release and thinking "that's so involved, I don't think I'd know where to begin'.
Recently rediscovered zombies for myself and while I haven't played much (I only have BO4 launch maps at the minute), I've been watching a ton of videos on it and this series is an insta-watch for me. Another certified banger.

I've been eagerly awaiting this one! WaW Nacht was my favorite map for many years. There's plenty of others I liked a lot, but nothing beat that simple "trapped in an abandoned building watching zombies stumble out of the fog" creepy factor. That "Night of the Living Dead" vibe.
Then not long ago I played this map after my best friend gave me their copy of Blops 3 (they got a digital only PS5 and didnt need the disc anymore).
As someone who is both a huge fan of Lovecraftian horror and classic Film Noir? This was the map that finally gave me a new contender for "favorite". I'm still not wild about how complicated the map is for a casual zombie fan like me, but the 1940's era city is gorgeous, the jazz music is perfect, the classic Noir character archetypes are great and the Cthulhu monsters are the cherry on top. I just fell in love with Shadows!

Shadows of Evil is my most played map by far, and it will always hold a special place in my heart.

All my friends hate on this map and I used to not like it either but then I LEARNED IT and let me just say I count myself as a casual and learning this map was actually pretty easy the more you do it the more it becomes as easy as just killing zombies the whole game and it becomes so much fun just killing margwas and unlocking more sh*t, this map introduced me to getting wonder weapons and Easter eggs and for that alone I praise it

Listening to the entire retrospective at work and just seeing now this just got uploaded made my day way better

Zombies at its peak for me!

Dude, your production value and scripts keep getting better and better; this is easily the best video in your entire series yet

Just binge watched this entire series, and I can't wait for the next video already. Amazing content bro.

I hated this map, wtf dude you've changed my perspective to a somewhat positive one. Stella work yet again, makes me miss those 3am Kino sessions with the boys.

shadows of evil is lowkey one of my top 5 maps oat. the easter egg grind is pretty fun, the vibes are immaculate, and it set up the story very well. had me excited to continue playing. esp since the map right after was a top 3 map oat. i wish The Giant wasnt paid DLC tho. only having Shadows wo having to spend more $ is def polarizing

Love your youtube channel, gives me so much joy and nostalgia to see some great throw back zombies content and break down

When you look at BO1 and 2 they both launched with a map which was fairly small, simple and easy. And the second map which was larger, more complicated and harder. And that worked very well in both games. So I did always wonder why BO3 launched with only one map that was very large, complicated and difficult as the only option. Because it would just turn the casual audience which is most of the playerbase off to zombies immediately. Especially when they had a second casual map right there and they didn't put it the base game.

Your getting better and better with each upload man. Keep it going 👍

I don't know why but when SOE released I hated it it may have been me being young but now I see the masterpiece it is

just wanna say, for me and the boys, soe is still our go to bo3 map

another cool detail is im pretty sure that those perk bottles that help you figure out which district has which perk are the bo2 perk bottle design and not the bo3 bottles

I love these videos so much. Please keep making them! Keeping zombies alive

I used to hate SOE. It's now my favourite map of all time. And Jeff Goldblum as Nero is absolutely perfect. My favourite celebrity character

Watched the first minute of this yesterday ;) great video as always!

Honestly if the giant was included without being a bonus zombies
Shadows would have really benefitted

Fun Fact when you look up “Dear god, he’s British” most of the results are fnaf memes

Yooo I found you yesterday and binged almost every episode!

This is the new one.
Another great video as always! I really look forward to them.

much love man

amazing video man! keep making bangers cliff

Amazing video, great analysis and spot on criticism! 10/10 as usual my friend!

Amazing vid
Love the map so much
Thank you

Missed you buddy, great video keep it up cant wait for der eisendrache

The quality of this video made me think you had like a million subs. Keep up the great work!

Man i when i first saw your channel i thought that you would have like 500k subs but only 16k? What im trying to say is that you have a really bright future here on youtube mate

Here before you reach 20k! Fantastic series

Shadows of Evil made me give up on BO3 Zombies when it first came out, which is a shame because now Der Eisdendrache is probably my favorite map ever. But I've been interested in learning it and giving it another chance. Looking forward to the DE video.

Starting here and working back. The buried video brought me to your channel

I hated shadows when it first came out but once you really get into it you begin to love it

The Widows WIne transition was inspired. Bravissimo Sir.

24:01 to be fair.. Jackie f***** Vincent calls them meatballs too

In Shi No Numa you can hear the correct perk jingle before opening the door.

20:00 theres a custom mapper named Verk0 thats giving TranZit the details it deserved, i would encourage everyone to take a look!

as someone who was new to zombies at the time and bo3 was my first time properly playing zombies (aside from kino at a friends house) the story, atmosphere and complexity of the map was what kept me hooked and still to this day shadows is my favorite map of all time. absolute f*cking masterpiece

I remember watching this video, when it was released yesterday.

I think the only thing that holds the map back for me is that there is no “fun” weapons in the box

I love everything abt SOE since the beginning just the look had me playing it for hours

LETS GOOO SHADOWS OF EVIL VIDEO

I cant wait for IX, IX was my fav map, to this day I play on it without taking any damage, it completely changes the entire game, it took me 2 YEARS to get from round 16 to round 18 through mastery of training and spawn points and wit

This was definitely the end for me. Hard to get invested in the story when u can only progress from external sources.

It must have been awful at first not being used to shadows and having no easy maps, but shadows is imo the best map ever made. When you do good on shadows it is actually satisfying

Jackie V at a glance can be pegged as a noir detective but personality-wise he’s more of a beat cop

On paper, this map should've been my younger selfs wet dream. Lovecraftian elements? Better graphics and more zombies? Yes! Only when I loaded up shadows of evil, and played it more and more, I found myself liking it less and less and less, despite really wanting to love it. I adore the aesthetic, but the map design to me was absolutely garbage, maybe I'm biased because I'm not a fan of black ops 3 in general. I was also not a fan of the growing complexity added to zombies, to me, origins and mob of the dead was the perfect balance of having lots to do, without feeling overwhelmed. To add to that, I always hated the gobblegum system which was just another nail in the coffin for me. All around, I wish I could love bo3 as much as some do, It does have some of the best zombies maps in the franchise, but I just can't bring myself around to loving, or even liking it. This began my distancing from the franchise, with advanced warfare being the last cod I sinked a lot of hours into.

Imo shadows of Evil is the best map ever made. Once you understand everything it’s extremely fun and challenging. Not too hard but not too easy

New vid, new awesome vid

28:38 ur friend getting chased by a meatball is so cartoony to me lol

Time to order some food

I never knew you could tell where the perk machines were by the bottles in the Junction! Holy sh*t, learn something new every day.

Another great video! Keep it up!
Off topic... How do you draw those lines on the map about 4 minutes in? After effects?

It shouldn't have been the launch map.

Post more man love the content keep it u o

As a person whose first map was SoE. This map definitely had quite a veneer to it which I found especially captivating, especially in terms of optimizing beast mode to be able to do each district utilizing only one beast mode and having Pack open on as low a round as possible (either round 2 or 3 depending on double points in spawn and other drops). Also the aesthetic of the map definitely aided in captivating my interest and had me straight addicted to playing the map. I must be an outlier but as my first map I didn’t find it to be that unintuitive that it would ultimately turn me off, quite the opposite.

I think the thing that hurt shadows the most was it being a launch map. But it was needed so the players could get accustomed to the new formula of zombies

Been sick the last three days, saw your buried video in my feed, this is good series for bench watching

I remember in the beginning that people loved this map, then they hated it for a little bit when Eisendrache came out, then everyone now loves it again

Babe wake up, new White cliff games video

I fully agree.
Shi no Numa feels like the start and Der Riese feels like a DLC. I love the Zielinski take. So much more than the Blundell take. Zielinski made it feel like DnD

This map rewards you for learning it, once you do it’s one of the easiest maps to set up
you can fully open each area with 1 beast mode,
your able to pap on round 1 without spawning in with rk5 or grabbing Sals 500 laundry Ticket (another reference to mob) , your able to see the sword symbols with beast mode jumps and not need the tram at all, saving you time and points when skilled enough, upgrading the sword or getting it is fun, since you get to kill margwas and zombies, rituals are really fun and easy you get points, and they spawn Margwas which give more points and are balanced but fun, and ww is easy to get but you have to be round 15+ which is also balanced, there’s only 1 ww but there’s aats, the wall weapons are great for Easter egg using civil protector and making an actual strat rewards you in flag step, like everyone watching a different area, not standing next to flag, and not shooting ww on the flag etc

babe wake up, white cliff games posted a video

I really like SoE and I miss the good old days of Zombies community around the BO3 era

I hate how much Zombies took off as a mode. Don't get me twisted, I LOVE Zombies for some casual fun, and hardcore grinding for whatever it is I'm trying to do. But every f*cking CoD keeps trying to make Zombies modes instead of what their games used to have. What made MW2 and MW3 so good was the fact their Spec Ops had a mix of campaign style missions, co-op missions and survival missions. MW3 even took it a step further and had one of the best survival type gamemodes and even had Chaos Survival which was dumb fun. But now it's all about ZOMBIES, ZOMBIES, ZOMBIES.

10:18 take that L

I remember watching the shadows of evil reveal and being stunned. It was too loud, too overproduced and too just… weird for zombies. Obviously zombies has only gotten crazier since but I have such a weird relationship with this map. It’s both great and awful as a zombies map.

The giant saved bo3.

I'm surprised the Margwa head wasn't mentioned.

NEW UPLOAD W

On the map to do the symbols for me i related them to food my friends lost it when I started doing this as it was completely random but I remembered them that way. It’s stupid but that’s how I did it.

I completely agree shadows being the only launch map was a mistake, and either the giant should have been on disc too or an original and more simple map should have been there in the mould of a kino or der riese. Personally I can't get into the complexity on my own much, if other people tell me what to do for an ee, I'll try but mostly my map knowledge goes to hitting pack a punch and the music ee. I think a side effect of the maps getting more complex with the potential for a more powerful player is the devs tried to met this challenge which to me is kinda misguided to an extent. While it keeps the game challenging and fresh to the experienced player, new players can be totally left in the dust at times and my biggest example is origins (I've not done too much shadows sorry), but the panzer at round 8 is such a huge skill check unless you have got to pap or got a staff which is pretty hard for new players to do that fast, and things like that keep me away from most of black ops 3 unless im grouped up with friends which barely happens, and going online on pc now is a massive security risk, because hackers are everywhere and they sometimes just cheat the fun out the game by turning on godmode for everyone or unlimited powerups, or they max level you give practically unlimited divinium and level up all the guns removing the grind of outside the game too. It's super frustrating, b03 is a game I wanna love it plays well and the weapons are mostly very fun, but i only tend to have fun on bo3 maps with friends, or zombie chronicles.
Sorry for the rambling long comment, great video series keep it up.

I hated this map on release but it’s honestly a favorite now for me, the run of mob of the dead and origins at the end of bo2 then followed by shadows, the giant and then der eisendrache in the beginning of bo3 was the best run of the whole series

This the only map Ik every setup steps

I love your content this sh*t is my crack

So many maps will consist of a few spaces you can actually be, and the rest of the map is narrow death traps that you sprint through as you move from location to location. That's really not the case with Shadows. Basically anywhere you go you're going to be in a location that has had so much thought and care put into it's design. And no matter where that downed teammate is there's a way of getting there on time. The 4 districts really should have been released as stand alone challenge maps like they did with Tranzit - the ritual rooms are iconic and it's kind of sad the high round community has never had any reason to make use of them cause each one (okay only a masoch*st is going to grind boxing gym) are masterfully crafted training spaces. Each of the 3 branches offer enough viable training spaces to support 4 players. The aesthetics and all that are the cherry on top, but to me it's the map design itself that makes Shadows the best map we've ever gotten. No map has had as much time and effort put into it, and it really does show.

Shadows of Kino

No way people hate SoE. Such a fun map and between der E is the only other map I revisit on Bo3

The amount of rounds you had to survive in MW3 depended on the map difficulty, but it was nowhere near infinite.

I didnt like shadows at launch due to the complexity but playing it now its easily one of my favorites of all time and can have pack a punch of an upgraded sword by round 10 its super easy if you put the time to learn the map

I think the zombie community sometimes forgets how poor ghosts and aw really were for the rest of cod, it brought a lot of mp players back to bo2 until bo3 came out and a lot of us came back and played zombies. Treyarch knew this, they released the first ever camo dlc’s during a different games life cycle which was huge back then and it was based of zombies! They also had so much pressure to get every aspect right, they didn’t but bo3 is still the last cod game a truly put my life into. Since then it’s only been downhill in my personal opinion

I LOVE REUPLOADS I LOVE REUPLOADS!!!!

King.

Shadows is still my favorite map of all time next to Origins. ❤

HAPPY PIE DAY EVERYONE!!!!!!!!!!!!! 🥧 10:14p.m. 3/14/2023

Babe wake up. A new zombies content creator just dropped

This map would’ve been cooler if it took place in a carnival type setting

Now watchout for the infinite meatball spawn

Shadows is a great balance

It's simply the GOAT!

I have every bo3 dlc , but I always play SOE, for some reason the way the map looks is soo pleasing too look at , the most annoying thing is doing the rituals each game

Great to see another zombies commentator coming to the fore!