Earlier this week at San Diego Comic-Con Activision and developer Sledgehammer Games fully pulled back the bloodstained curtain on Call of Duty: WWII Nazi Zombies. We all got to see the game’s gruesome new trailer, but the Nazi Zombies panel wasn’t livestreamed – aside from a few tweets from the official Call of Duty Twitter account, we haven’t received full details.
Well, that’s now changed, as Activision has released the entire Nazi Zombies SDCC 2017 panel online. The Q&A, which features Sledgehammer Games co-founder Michael Condrey, Nazi Zombies creative director Cameron Dayton, and Sledgehammer director of development Jon Horsley, as well as the game’s core cast of David Tennant, Elodie Yung, Katheryn Winnick, and Udo Kier, can be viewed above.
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Scroll down for some of the key points touched on…
True Horror
Michael Condrey previously directed the acclaimed horror game Dead Space, and he really wanted to emphasize Nazi Zombies is going to be a full return to the terror of his previous games.
“Yeah, [Dead Space] was a great experience for us. We started that team a decade ago, and we saw an opportunity to come to a place where we can really terrify fans in a way that great films have done, but in an interactive way. Dead Space was about immersing you in a place you believed in, then terrify you like those films you loved in your childhood.”
Meanwhile, creative director Cameron Dayton detailed the many shades of fear Sledgehammer hopes to inspire with Nazi Zombies…
“Horror is something we’ve been living, breathing, talking about. Because we are geeks, we’ve dissected horror and talked about all the ways you can feel fear. You’ve got the easy jump scare, but you’ve also got the simmering, boiling fear, the environmental, and there’s so much there in Nazi Zombies. You’ve only seen a tiny fraction of the creatures we’ve made in the trailer.”
The Story
So, what’s Nazi Zombies all about? According to Condrey and Jon Horsley the game is basically a gore-soaked version of the George Clooney movie The Monuments Men.
“World War II, reality was often stranger than fiction. A lot was going on during the war, after the war. I think we’ve all been exposed to the MFAA group that went out to retrieve stolen art. The MFAA team are our heroes. They’re deployed into a village, and they find much more than art. And that sets the stage for the confrontation with the villains and the zombies.”
The Characters
Nazi Zombies’ core cast (minus Ving Rhames) were also a part of the panel, and gave some brief descriptions of their characters. Here’s David Tennant on who he’s playing:
“I play Drostan Hynd — He even looks like me, it’s amazing! — he’s an antiquities expert, and he’s been in prison and been let out under the understanding he’ll work for the good guys. And he swears a lot. An awful lot. I was invited to bring some of my experience growing up in Scotland, so we did some improv swearing.”
And here’s Elodie Yung:
“I’m playing Olivia Durant, she was in the French Resistance. She was an art historian who worked at the Louvre, and she was very keen on joining the team because he dad was captured by the Nazis. She’s sort of the guide of the team. My grandad and great grandad were in the French Resistance, so I was really keen to do the role.”
Katheryn Winnick:
“I play Marie Fisher, and she is born in Germany, but she decided to leave the family business. Her father was a weapons maker. She decided to study in Cambridge, and she went to the States, and she was recruited by the OSS and became a spy. Her main goal is to find her brother Klaus again.”
And finally, the always terrifying Udo Kier:
“I play Doctor Straub, the Nazi Doctor, and I’ve built a new kind of soldier. A soldier who never sleeps, eats, or dies, but actually I have done much more — I have created the Devil himself. And I have a good time.”
Call of Duty: WWII Nazi Zombies shambles onto PC, Xbox One, and PS4 on November 3. You can check out all WWG’s latest Call of Duty coverage here.
