Take yourself back 2 years. Modern Warfare 2019 has been out for almost 5 months with no battle royale mode. A great game for sure but lacking a BR in this day and age is a sure-fire way to ensure any FPS game doesn’t hit peak popularity. You’re still gliding into firing range on the blackout map, wondering why the casual player base has deserted it leaving you with nothing but high skilled opponents. You may have been building never-ending stacks of ramps and walls in Fortnite. Perhaps you were traversing the infinite zip wires of Kings Canyon in Apex Legends, the latest major BR to have been released, or maybe you had gone all the way back to school in PUBG. One thing is certain, no matter what you were doing with your gaming time back then, it was all about to change!
On March 9th 2020, the “Classified” tab in the Modern Warfare 2019 menu changed to a 24 hour countdown and Activision released a trailer for the upcoming game mode, “Warzone”. There had obviously been many leaks and rumours for months that this was coming but that didn’t decrease the hype one bit, in fact I may have been the main contributor.
When the countdown ceased, Warzone became playable. 150 players, a huge map, incredible Modern Warfare mechanics, some of the best graphics seen in any battle royale to date. Warzone was an instant success. It is estimated that Warzone hit 50 million users within 1 month of release, an incredible and record-breaking figure.
What made Warzone so popular?
From my perspective there were a few key reasons that Warzone thrived:
First and foremost was the player count. Having 150 players in one map had not been done before in a BR game, and doing it meant high kill games became the content creation meta. This drove a fast paced, aggressive, and constantly on the move style of play that was emulated by players across the game. Previous BR titles such as PUBG, H1Z1, Apex Legends and Fortnite were much less aggressively played overall, they involved playing more tactically in an effort win the game as opposed to not worrying if you win and just aiming to get as many kills as possible. In a very “Call of Duty” manner, KDR (Kill to Death ratio) became the most important stat a player could flex, as opposed to win, or win % in other BR games.
Secondly, Call of Duty making Warzone free to play (not just a positive, more on that later) and making it crossplay had a huge impact on its success compared to Blackout. Blackout was a great game and arguable the best BR at its time of release, it was a game in thoroughly enjoyed playing for a long time, however, after a few months it became harder and harder to compete against your opponents as a casual player. Because it was not free to play, when casual player abandoned it a few months into its cycle, there were very few replacement players because it meant having to buy Black Ops 4 just to play the BR mode. Warzone being available for free to all players was a huge move and making it cross play ensured its longevity on all platforms.
Third, and probably the biggest influence on the enormous success was the pandemic. COVID 19 caused many countries to have restrictions on socialising and even leaving the house for work or school. The last 2 years have been a harrowing time for a lot of people, but Activision saw a huge upside from it. More people at home means more people playing computer games. Children not having to go to school means children playing more computer games, the same applies with adults not going to their workplace. The pandemic led to a huge influx of players racking up more time on games than ever before and this all started not long after the launch of Warzone, so it makes sense that this new BR game was the main beneficiary of this extra time. On top of the added players and playing time, more people took up content creation, either through streaming video games or though uploading them to YouTube, and once again Warzone was at the forefront of this with huge record-breaking numbers of viewers watching people play this fast paced and nonstop action battle royale!
The other side of the coin.
After a few short months it became evident that Warzone had (and to this day still does have) a gargantuan problem in the form of cheaters.
Cheat developers started popping up with new cheats for the most popular game around. Everywhere you looked there was a YouTube advert for one cheat dev, a tweet about another, a Facebook post about another… On and on this downward spiral went until we reached a point that people were facing cheaters in most of their lobbies.
At first the cheats were easily detectable, harsh snaps onto an enemy being the main giveaway, but the cheat developers were already working on making their software more customisable. You can adjust your aimbot FOV so that it will only recognise an enemy within a small area surrounding your crosshairs, this gets rid of the enormous full screen snaps we see from “rage hackers”, you can add aim smoothness and adjust the aim speed to eradicate snaps all together. We saw the introduction of “Silent Aim”, a software that allows the rage hacking snaps from one enemy to the next but manipulates the players screen to now show it, basically shoot and hit whatever enemy is visible within a set distance. You get the point I am making here; cheats have grown so much during these 2 years of Warzone and without a shadow of a doubt it has ruined what was once an incredible game, the masterpiece of battle royale if you will.
Activision had to act eventually to combat this plague of cheaters, and they did so with the launch of COD Vanguard, promising a working and effective anti-cheat called ‘Ricochet’. I think most of us would agree that his has failed. Whether because the source code was leaked to cheat devs as is widely believed, or whether it is because the cheats and methods of bypassing the anti-cheat have become so complex that a kernel level anti cheat just can’t detect them, ‘Ricochet’ does not have the effect Activision promised us.
Outside of cheating there have been 2 main negatives drawn on since Warzone’s release. The first of which is the plethora of bugs and glitches in the game, from demon guns to being able to fall under the map, there have been numerous game breaking issues to content with. This is perhaps due to Warzone being so much bigger than Activision imagined, and because of this creating new versions alongside subsequent COD game releases such as Black Ops Cold War and Vanguard, but nonetheless it does detract from the overall experience of the game.
Finally, the new map for Warzone Pacific. While I personally am actually a big fan of the map, it does feel a lot less “Warzone” than Verdansk did, it plays more like a PUBG map than the fast-paced high kill map we got on Warzone’s release, so it is understandable that the majority of players feel it was a step backwards to change to this map from Verdansk.
Warzone has seen huge ups and downs over the last 2 years, and likely we will have around 1 more year to enjoy what is yet to come from the game, but it has to be said that aside from the problems it brough, Warzone innovated the BR scene, propelled it to heights no one thought possible and has provided millions of people a fantastic escape from the bleakness that real life has provided over the last 2 years. Let us hope that Warzone 2 arrives with a way of stopping cheating in its tracks, minimal bugs and issues and encapsulates everything that is good about Warzone when it does make its way to our systems!
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