3 Things Battle Royale Players Should Know Before Dropping Into ‘Call Of Duty: Warzone’

Call of Duty

Credit: Activision

Nobody puts up numbers like Call of Duty. The shooter behemoth’s new free-to-play battle royale mode Warzone wracked up 6 million players in just 24 hours, dwarfing even the colossal success of Apex Legends. If you’re not one of those 6 million yet, you might want to jump in and see what it’s all about, but you’ll be in for a different experience than what you might expect from other battle royale games, or even from Call of Duty’s previous battle royale offering. Warzone is big, strange and fun, but there are some things you should know before dropping in.

There’s no solo queue: This is a big one, and sort of an unforced error. When Apex Legends launched with no solo option, it was a bit of a shock but made sense: the entire game was built around complimentary hero characters meant to work as a team, and Respawn had built out what was then a new “ping” system to let more cautious or shy players communicate without voices. In order for the game to maintain its distinct identity at launch, the logic went, people needed to play as a team.

That doesn’t feel nearly as important here in Warzone. Sure, there are plenty of ways to play as a team, but it’s not nearly as central as it is in Apex Legends. Still, that’s what we’re working with here in Warzone. If you want to play, for the moment, know that you’re going to be doing it with friends or strangers.

It’s not Blackout, and it feels a lot like Call of Duty: When Blackout launched for Call of Duty: Black Ops 4, it felt a whole lot like PUBG, just in Call of Duty. It had the slick, polished feel that you expect from a behemoth like this, but it followed the same basic aesthetic of PUBG: sparse buildings with loot scattered through open space and occasional larger landmarks, with gameplay mostly marked by a looming sense of hunting dread punctuated by intense, if often brief, action.

That’s less the case this time around. We still have a lot of the hallmarks of the battle royale genre, but there are a ton of additions that make it feel less like PUBG and more like Call of Duty. The map is dense and chaotic, with a cash and “contract” system that cuts down on tense searching phase of the game and fills it with a lot more structure. There are ample respawn options, from standard revives to self revives, team buybacks and the Gulag, where defeated players can duke it out 1 vs. 1 with other defeated players for a chance to get back in the game. There are also perks, killstreaks, loadouts and more: there’s just a lot of stuff.

It all adds up to an experience with a dramatically different feel than PUBG or even the comparatively speedy Fortnite. Expect a lot more to do at all times, more action and more structure, even if we do still have the tension afforded by a constantly winnowing field of opponents. None of this is bad, and in a lot of ways this is one of the most interesting takes on the genre I’ve seen in a while. But it can be a bit jarring.

The file size is gigantic: This is really more of a logistical thing than anything else, but if you’re planning on playing, it’s something that you do have to know. You’ll have to make space for this one. It’s between 80-100 gb depending on your platform, so be forewarned.

Tweet