“Is there fall damage in Warzone?” One of the most common questions on Warzone’s launch was usually answered by a straight trip to the Gulag. Although Blackout was the first Battle Royale in the Call of Duty franchise, Warzone was a whole new experience for many.
Subsequently the hype surrounding the new launch was also on a whole new level with leaks, announcements and trailers all firing the fans up until downloads started on March 10th one year ago.
The overarching question if Warzone is a good game can be easily answered with “yes” as a short look in the community shows.
Discovering Verdansk for the first time was a great experience for many players. Others were more concerned with how armor worked or how to actually land the helicopter but every fan found something to do in the CoD Battle Royale.
The beginnings of a milestone in the genre
Warzone was and is more than “just another” Battle Royale for the CoD community. Entering the market with the free-to-play model Warzone it brought many first-timers to the Call of Duty franchise and grew the playerbase by quite a lot. So Warzone was most certainly a success for Publisher Activision.
But even with all the accolades Warzone also had growing pains. Initially the game seemed very clean and almost bugfree but as time went on players not only found weapon metas but also more unintended issues in Verdansk
Shortly after, reports made the rounds of players glitching themselves into walls and more to get an underhanded advantage. But in most cases the developers were right on the mark and xied the issues as they appeared.
Updates, new modes, events und Cheater
The next couple of weeks and months continued in this manner, but the updates also brought new modes like plunder. The rotations in the playlists also made sure to keep the game interesting and different.
Special events were also a strength Warzone could rely on. Players are still fondly remembering the Hollywood special “Haunting of Verdansk”. But with the continued success and popularity of Warzone the players had to face an increasing amount of cheaters in lobbies.
What started out as a single cheater in every tenth lobby, became a larger and persistent problem over time. Now it has gotten to a point that people do not even bat an eyebrow if they get headshot by a Grau over a distance of several hundred meters from a helicopter. While the developers are still trying their best with fixes and banwaves, cheating is still a large issue in Warzone lobbies.
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Additionally more and more glitches appeared that ruined competitive integrity without cheats. The most prominent one would be the infinite stims that allowed players to stay in the gas indefinitely to steal a victory. While it got fixed by the developers it kept coming back after following updates.
Failed Integration and Hope
As great as the enthusiasm of the players was before and during the release, the Cold War integration into Warzone had many worried. While they were looking forward to the new weapons and possibilities, many of the existign problems would not be fixed by the integration.
Instead the new weapons also brought even more bugs and balance issues. Many of the attachments introduced back then are only working now, months after the integration.
Despite all these issues Warzone remains a game with a huge fanbase and great potential. With major changes inbound such as the end of Verdansk, the hype is still there. Hopefully Raven Entertainment can then follow up on that with a determined crackdown against the cheaters. If they do that successfully, Warzone might just be the best Battle Royale of all time.
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