Call Of Duty: Warzone After One Year, Is The Game Well Liked?

Call of Duty: Warzone or just simply Warzone, is among the biggest surprises of the last year. Why would it be a surprise? If you remember back to the mid 2000’s, every MMORPG was trying to be the World of Warcraft killer. City of Heroes, Age of Conan, Lord of the Rings: Online, Star Wars: Galaxies, Tabula Rasa, the list goes on. It’s a very similar world where other Battle Royale games are trying to knock off Fortnite. Most are doing it in similar ways, but failing. Here’s where Warzone came in.

What if you copy the same general Battle Royale (BR for short) style, but change the formula and add one of the most popular shooters ever? You get Warzone. It wasn’t always that easy though. Where WZ ran, Call of Duty: Black Ops 4‘s Blackout mode had to crawl. WZ owes more to that mode than I think we all realize. While I was a late adopter to WZ and didn’t play Blackout very much at all (Black Ops 4 is the last great Call of Duty multiplayer game, fight me in the comments), the similarities are there.

We might even see a reworked “Blackout II” map as the basis for a new WZ map coming up whenever they drop the nuke on Verdansk. WZ is the future of Call of Duty. For someone like me, who is not only bad at WZ, but also a huge fan of Multiplayer, that’s kind of sad. At it’s best, Warzone is heavily enjoyable, especially with friends. But at it’s worst, it’s painful to play. Getting laser’ed by whatever flavor of the month gun that JGOD says is the best is the worst. Having that happen game after game almost ruins it. I said almost.

Warzone Somehow Keeps You Coming Back And It’s Devil Magic, I Swear

I have no clue why after a night of screaming at the monitor into my headset to my friends on Discord, I go back. I’ve uninstalled. (Particularly after trying to get the AMAX without playing Modern Warfare). But then quickly reinstalled the massive game. Through it all, there’s one constant. The game somehow keeps me coming back. I don’t know if that’s just because my friends play, or what. It’s the one constant throughout this lockdown time. Before I played, it was my friends screaming on Discord, “THERE’S A GUY IN THE WINDOW” more times than I can count. Now I’m that guy screaming about the window.

I love Call of Duty. I skipped a couple years there, but Black Ops 4 brought me back in the fold and I won’t be leaving anytime soon. I hated Modern Warfare, but I’ll likely be getting Modern Warfare II whenever that comes out. But on this one year anniversary of Warzone, we can see where the game is headed. Activision has big plans for the game and it might render the Multiplayer obsolete. I sure hope there’s room for both in the future, because nothing will beat the best of times in a Call of Duty multiplayer game with friends online.

Lockdown, at least in the US, might have been the best time for Warzone to debut. Think about it, the game has exploded in popularity, YouTube channels devoted to the game are blowing up left and right. It’s like the craze after Modern Warfare 1 and 2.

Call Me Crazy, Call Me Bad, Just Don’t Call Me Dogwater, Because I Don’t Know What It Means

I asked a bunch of people who play the game as religiously as I do. What was the one constant about the game being miserable to play? It sure wasn’t the DMR or the AUG.

The goddamn cheaters.

Cheaters.

F**king cheaters.

Whether it’s aimbots, wallhacks, or whatever else you use to cheat, it makes the game miserable. I’m going to throw exploits like the Stim-Shot glitch and Gas-Mask glitches in here too. You know who you are, we know you used it. I’m not going to go full “I hope a meteor hits your house” about it. But I kind of hope a small meteor hits your computer if you cheat.

It’s a big issue that Activision could just fix with anti-cheat. For whatever reason they don’t. Banning thousands of accounts in purges every couple months doesn’t solve anything. The game is free. I can go back and play Star Wars: Battlefront II (the good one) on PC, and it stills says “Protected By GameSpy” when I load the damn game up.

Now that company might be defunct, but it meant that a game from 2005 had anti-cheat. So why not the biggest, highest grossing game in 2021? Because Activision is lazy and evil? That’s probably the answer.

Now That We’ve Gotten Cheaters Out Of The Way, Oh Wait, F*ck Cheaters Still

That heading might be misleading. I’m done talking about cheaters. But what else did the people polled say needs to be fixed about the game? The map? We’ve all been playing on Verdansk long enough to where it feels like home. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve died outside Superstore, or inside. But the map hasn’t had big changes for it’s entire run. Sure, we’ve got Zombies, and nukes, and all that cool stuff. But what about some huge changes to the environment?

We’re likely seeing this soon, so these points might be moot in about a month or whatever. It’s still a valid criticism that brings up the bigger point. Does Warzone have a large team working on it? I mean like after the map launches and all the money is poured into that, do they have quality control? There are far too many issues with the game that arise from attachments not doing what they say. Or just times where it seems like they forgot to add a plus instead of a negative for attachments.

I’ve never worked on a AAA title that makes millions of dollars before. So I might be talking out of my ass, but it seems like data input like that would be the easiest thing to do? I might be wrong on that one. For a company like Activision, it’s unacceptable. With a normal Call of Duty game, you can let issues slide because it’s always next year. Warzone II isn’t coming to save the day. Sure, Call of Duty 2021 is coming, but that means there’s more issues that come up from integration in Warzone.

Overwhelmingly Positive, Addicting, But Maddening As Anything Ever

Somehow the overarching feeling with the game is this. It has all the best feelings of a Call of Duty game. Smooth movement, quick gameplay, skill-intensive gunfights (you can debate this one), and that feeling of winning isn’t matched by anything else. The Loadout system is what sets it apart from other games in the BR genre. It’s not all about the loot in the late game. You have your playskill and your choices on Loadout. Every game can be different if you want it to be. It’s your strategy. Play safe? Go aggro? It all works.

The negatives don’t seem to outweigh the positives on the game though. I’ve yelled and hollered at the game only to come back the next day and forget that it was misery last night. Why is that? I couldn’t find an exact answer, but maybe you can think of it. After a year of Warzone, the future is bright. It’s just obscured by cheating, slow fixes, glitches, exploits, and those goddamn tracer rounds. You know who you are if you bought those.

The next year of Warzone is going to prove if it’s here to stay or just got lucky for a year of people being locked inside. Fortnite is the biggest competitor, but they play like vastly different games in the same genre. So we’ll have to figure out what the future holds.

As for me, we’ll have to fight for Verdansk in the coming months. Let’s hope there aren’t any scum cheaters there to block our triumphant last stand.

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