How cheaters ruined Call of Duty Zombies' great hunt

The latest Call of Duty Zombies map, Kowakujō, finally managed what zombies fans had been wanting for years: a multi-day easter egg hunt. Every Zombies map has a main quest (usually called the easter egg) that is hidden from players. As soon as the maps launch, the community jumps in to try and solve them. They normally involve an hour-long series of collecting hidden items, killing zombies in creative ways, and solving simple puzzles – but there’s very few hints on what you actually have to do. Since Black Ops: Cold War, the developers have been accused by the community of making these quests too easy and the easter egg hunts rarely took more than a few hours. With Kowakujō, the entire community (me included) was still hunting after nearly 60 hours.Then cheaters came along and ruined it for everyone. So what really happened?

We had been stuck on the same step of the Kowakujō easter egg for days. A lot of the puzzles were solved in the first few hours then the leads dried up and nobody knew what to do. These quests are a community effort and as soon as a step is found it’s quickly shared across social media, so everyone coalesces at the same point. We knew we needed to find a puffer fish, which was a possible poison used to assassinate the shogun of a Japanese Castle, the father of one of the protagonists. We also knew we needed other pieces of evidence to solve the crime, because the game’s UI had empty slots showing what was still uncollected, but we had no idea where to go next. At the point where progress had halted on the second day of the hunt, there were still seven items left to find.

Then, on the third day, suddenly someone who wasn’t streaming had solved the entire thing. A streamer called Freckleston went live and announced that it had been an open secret in some groups that the steps had been datamined from the ‘Directed Mode’ in the game. Directed Mode comes out a month after each map and serves as an in-game guide that holds your hand through the entire quest. For some reason the steps from this mode were already in the game files and some people had found them and shared the guide around. Because the steps found were just text strings with no locations attached, the guide for the part we were stuck on wasn’t enough to help the dataminers solve it for nearly 60 hours. But once they managed to work it out, they could use the rest of the guide to beat the entire thing.

Freckleston was streaming while in a Discord chat with ZoneX, the owner of the largest Zombies Discord, who had openly posted about this Directed Mode leak on social media, saying he already knew the steps but wasn’t going to share them. Apparently ZoneX often has leaks and information about the Zombies maps before they go live and said in this stream that he always knows all of the steps ahead of time, so doesn’t participate in the hunts. They discussed what had happened and that they had seen other streamers (including MrDalekJD, who was leading the team I was on) talking about specific things related to the leaked steps.