How to Install Call of Duty: World at War and Join a Server

Finish the campaign in Call of Duty: World at War and the game gives you a small bonus map. One room, boarded windows, four players, a wooden crate of weapons on the wall, and an endless supply of the dead trying to get in.

Nobody at Treyarch expected that to matter. It was an unlockable extra, tucked behind the credits of a Second World War shooter, and it went on to outlive every other thing in the game and spawn a mode that has been in almost every Call of Duty since. Nacht der Untoten is where Zombies begins.

Seventeen years later, that room and the enormous community of custom maps built in its image are the main reason people still install this. Listings collect on the World at War hub.

What this game is

Treyarch built it in 2008 on the engine Infinity Ward had just used for Call of Duty 4, and the result is exactly what that sentence implies: Modern Warfare's speed, weight and responsiveness applied to 1944.

That combination was unusual and it holds up. The Second World War shooters that came before it were slower and more deliberate, closer to Medal of Honor: Allied Assault and Day of Defeat. World at War moves like a modern game while handing you a bolt-action rifle, and the friction between those two facts is the whole character of it.

The campaign runs across two fronts — the Pacific against Japan, and the Eastern Front pushing towards Berlin — and it is considerably nastier in tone than the series had been.

It also supports four players co-operatively, which was not standard at the time and is still a good evening. What makes it work is that the co-op campaign keeps score. Everybody is competing on kills and accuracy while simultaneously needing each other to survive the next set piece, and the resulting mixture of cooperation and quiet sabotage is much funnier than a straight co-op mode would be. Four people who know each other playing through a difficult level, arguing about who took whose kill, is the version of this game most people remember most fondly.

It is a paid game on Steam.If Steam itself is new to you, our Steam guide starts further back than this one does.

Zombies, properly

The mode is four players in an enclosed space against waves that never stop.

Kill zombies, earn points. Spend points opening doors, which enlarges the area you have to defend and gives you access to better weapons. Repair the barricades between waves. Keep moving, because standing still in a corner is how a group of four becomes a group of one.

The first map is a single building. The second adds a proper floor plan and the electricity you need to switch on before half of it works. The third puts you in a Pacific swamp with rooms you reach by opening zip lines. And the fourth, Der Riese, introduced the machine that upgrades your weapon and the teleporters that let you cross the map instantly, and in doing so set the template every Zombies map since has followed.

What makes the mode last is that each map hides a sequence. There is an order of things to switch on, and the game does not tell you what it is. Working that out with three other people, over several failed attempts, is the actual content. Shooting is how you buy time to think.

The custom maps, and why they matter more than the official ones

Treyarch released mod tools for the PC version. That single decision is why this game has a community and Black Ops does not have one on the same scale.

People built maps. Then they built better maps. Then they built maps with custom weapons, custom zombie types, custom rulesets, elaborate hidden sequences that take a group hours to solve, and eventually maps that were more ambitious than anything shipped officially. That scene has been running continuously for over fifteen years and it has not stopped.

Custom content is distributed through the Steam Workshop as well as through the community sites that hosted it before the Workshop existed. The Workshop route is much the easier of the two, because subscribing handles the download and the placement for you.

A few things worth knowing before you start:

1. Custom maps are loaded through the game's own mods menu, not by picking them from the ordinary map list. If you have subscribed to something and cannot find it, that is where to look.

1. Not every custom map is meant for four players over the internet. Some are built for solo. Some are built to be played co-operatively and are close to impossible alone. The map's own description says which, and reading it saves an argument.

1. The scene has a wide quality range. Fifteen years of everybody's first project sits alongside fifteen years of the best work in the genre. Sort by what has been played, not by what is newest.

The competitive multiplayer

The multiplayer half is Call of Duty 4's design with the modern weapons removed and the period ones put back in, and it works better than that description suggests.

Bolt-action rifles are viable in a way they had not been for years, because the engine's responsiveness makes them feel precise rather than sluggish. The flamethrower is exactly as unpleasant to face as you would imagine. Some maps put drivable tanks in, which changes the whole shape of a match — a tank that nobody is answering is a problem that only gets worse.

And there are the dogs. Reach a killstreak and the game releases a pack of them onto the enemy team, and the resulting thirty seconds of everybody sprinting for a doorway is one of the most memorable things in the series.

What ties all of that together is that the maps are small and dense in a way the series drifted away from afterwards. There is nowhere on most of them that is more than fifteen seconds from a fight, which suits the weapons — a bolt-action rifle across a courtyard, a flamethrower in a trench system, a tank on the one road wide enough for it. Larger maps would have made the period arsenal feel like a handicap. These ones make it feel like a choice.

Dedicated servers exist and are the point. Community machines run their own rules, their own map rotations and their own player counts, which is a different proposition entirely from a matchmaking playlist.

Connecting to a specific server

There is a server browser in the multiplayer menu. It lists what it can reach, it sorts imperfectly, and it is entirely usable once you clear the filters that come set by default — an unnoticed filter for a mode nobody is currently playing produces an empty list that looks convincingly like a dead game.

The better habit is to choose the server first. Listings gather on the hub, where each entry is queried directly rather than trusting what a server says about itself.

Take the port along with the IP address. A host running six servers on one machine has five of them somewhere other than the default, and an address pasted without its port fails without explaining itself.

The console on this engine family is enabled through the game's own settings rather than being available by default, and once it is on it accepts a connect command with an address. If the version you have does not expose one, the browser's favourites list achieves the same result — you add a server by address, it stays in your list, and you rejoin it in two clicks from then on.

Favourites matter more than they sound. The population on a game of this age is habitual and regional. The same group of people plays on the same box at the same time every evening, and a server that looks abandoned at four in the afternoon is full at nine at night in its own timezone. Finding two or three that fill at your hour is the entire difference between "this game is dead" and having somewhere to go.

Running one

A World at War server is not a demanding thing to host, and plenty of the community machines still running are somebody's spare box.

The decisions that actually matter are not technical. How many slots — and the instinct to set it high is nearly always wrong, because how many slots a game server should have is a question about how full you want to look rather than how many people you are hoping for. And where the machine physically sits, because region choice decides who gets a playable ping and who does not.

The third decision is the map rotation, and it is the one people get wrong most. A rotation that is one person's preferences imposed on everybody empties a server slowly, and the fix is to let the room vote on it.

Problems you will actually hit

A custom map crashes on load. Frequently a mismatch between what the map expects and what is installed alongside it. Loading one custom map at a time, rather than everything you have subscribed to at once, isolates it quickly.

You subscribed to something and it is not in the game. Check the mods menu rather than the map list.

Co-op with friends will not start. Custom zombie maps have to be running on every machine in the group, in the same version. One person on a different version breaks the whole session.

Everything is at 180 ms. You are on another continent. Sort by ping and use favourites.

The game will not launch on a current version of Windows. A 2008 title occasionally needs compatibility settings adjusting, and verifying the files through Steam is the first thing to try.

Anti-cheat kicked you and you were not cheating. On old titles this is usually the server's own configuration rather than anything you have done. Try a different community.

Why it survived and the ones next to it did not

Mod tools. That is the entire answer.

Games from this era that shipped with the ability to build for them still have people building for them. Games that did not have a fixed amount of content and eventually ran out. World at War got a fifteen-year second life because Treyarch handed over the keys, and the custom zombie scene has produced more content than the original game contained by an enormous margin.

If the mode is what has caught your attention, Black Ops is the direct sequel and took Zombies from a bonus to a headline feature, while Black Ops III has its own large custom map community for much the same reason this one does.

If it is the shooter rather than the zombies, Call of Duty 4 is the game whose engine this one borrowed and remains the purest version of that design. And the older, slower Second World War entries are all still running with community servers and none of the progression apparatus that arrived later — the original Call of Duty and its United Offensive expansion in particular.

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JoinGG is a live directory of community game servers. Every listing is queried directly every fifteen minutes, so the player count you see was measured rather than reported by its owner, and each one carries a copyable connect address. Call of Duty: World at War servers are listed here, and every game on the site has its own hub. Player counts across every game are on the statistics page.