[zls]

While this may be true-ish of the mainline Call of Duty games, it is very not-true of Warzone.

Warzone was an immensely popular free-to-play Battle Royale game, released at exactly the right time during the pandemic to catch the wave of isolated people looking for new, online group activities. In contrast to other Battle Royale games, it was much faster-paced and forgiving, with more emphasis on fun gunplay than realism or "tactics."

Last November, they released Warzone 2, while simultaneously effectively shutting down the original Warzone. And it's a complete 180 from the original. The game is much more like a conventional BR... extremely slow paced and "tactical," and much more difficult to recover from an early mistake. And while it's hard to point to any one piece of data, the overwhelming sense in the community is that the game is not performing well; viewers on Twitch have fallen off massively since the release, and players are down massively since release. Again, I don't want to say "the game is in trouble," but it's telling that the developers are being bizarrely forthcoming in their "here is what we're going to change, we promise" posts, compared to how they handled the original Warzone. And anecdotally, my group of ~8 people that used to play Warzone every few days all abandoned WZ2 within the first week or two.

And I continue to be absolutely perplexed by their decision. Their game was wildly successful, differentiated itself from other BRs for its gameplay, and got incredibly lucky with their pandemic timing. Why oh why would they totally eschew their winning recipe, kill all that momentum, in order to emulate less successful competitors??

[smolder]

I don't want to argue at length here, but I disagree: Warzone in either form was just as uninspired as regular CoD. They more or less copy-pasted game mechanics from the other BR titles that established the genre onto their game. They are now doing more mechanics-cloning with their Tarkov-esque game mode.

[zls]

I also don’t want to argue at length. But I don’t think we need to! I think we’re on the same page.

If you’re into indie games, where a new game can challenge what a genre even means, then naturally Warzone will seem unoriginal. That’s a totally fair opinion, and I also prefer indie games. But that’s less of a critique than you simply not enjoying AAA games. Would you call Elden Ring uninspired because it’s just Breath of the Wild + Dark Souls?

On the other hand, there’s a class of games which they release annually, with each game being obviously just a reskin of the previous iteration, with perhaps negligible gameplay changes. FIFA is the most notorious offender here, with some releases updating nothing but player rosters, for a full sticker price. And mainline COD largely falls into that bucket… they just rehash the same gameplay while cycling through different settings (“it’s been a few years, let’s do WW2 again”).

The point I was trying to make is, WZ2 is not that latter category. The innovation may be small compared to indies, but the changes to pacing and gameplay from WZ->WZ2 were fairly radical (and, uh, disastrous), so it’s interesting to glean what we can about wtf they’re thinking and planning.

[schwap]

Come on, loadouts and the 'gulag' respawn mechanic were clearly novel in the BR space.

[ng12]

How is that any different from the original CoD w.r.t. other FPS games? Warzone is certainly at least as differentiated from Fortnite and PUBG as CoD is from CounterStrike.

[ethbr0]

> Why oh why would they totally eschew their winning recipe, kill all that momentum, in order to emulate less successful competitors??

They wouldn't be the first development team to lose the "What are we already doing right?" core features in the "What aren't we doing?" sprint.

[NoPicklez]

While I agree it came out at the right time, I don't think it was faster-paced and more forgiving than the the next most popular BR Fortnite. But yes it is compared to PUBG and Tarkov. Fortite is also probably as "fun" gunplay as you can get in comparison.

In my opinion, the only reason Warzone was/is popular was because it is the COD version of Battle Royale, that most gamers wanted to see since many of us played COD growing up.

I found it okay, but it felt like a rehashed COD on a larger map.

I am a Fortnite fanboy since its inception and what keeps me around is the constant change of the map either throughout the seasons or the complete map changes every chapter. Warzone suffers because it becomes too repetitive.

[jacooper]

Most people don't actually like batlle royale, its just happened that most free games at the time were battle royals. Now that are many more options, battle royals games aren't as big anymore.