Call of Duty Warzone marked a big moment for Call of Duty, launching to randomly coincide with lockdowns in 2020 and attracting huge swathes of players to its battle royale format.
Three years on you’d think that Warzone 2.0 was a gimme for Activision, but its launch has shown that the games-as-service world is more complicated than it seems.
The new version of Warzone took some huge steps forward visually and technically, but three months after its launch it’s about to release a seasonal update to consciously revoke a long list of the gameplay tweaks it made.
Its iconic second-chance Gulag will no longer be a 2v2 fight, reverting to 1v1; it will no longer have a complex backpack looting system, going back to the old system; armour will no longer be locked behind randomly-looted vests; loadouts will now spawn just like they did in the first Warzone instead of being rarer.
There are more changes than just these - and you cancheck out the full list using our dedicated article on the subject- but what the list demonstrates is an interesting blind spot that many huge videogame companies still seem to have.
How is it, after all, that a company with the resources of Activision can oversee a release that has so rapidly had to abandon so many of its flagship changes to revert to the successful older template? Did market research happen, or large-scale playtesting - and if it did, as we assume, why did it lead to conclusions that have proved wrong?
This is even more baffling when you consider that Warzone is developed in aggregate by a range of studios under Activision’s helm, with Raven Software and Infinity Ward in the lead. For another rhetorical question, how did Raven Software square away the fact that quality-of-life changes it made to Warzone 1 in the last year of that game’s active support would not be present at launch for a newer title?
One of the potential answers could lie in that very aggregation - Warzone 2.0 is contributed to by a massive range of talented and dedicated developers, but that lack of centralised decision-making is one possible explanation for its odd gameplay tweaks ahead of launch.
Raven might have had a heap of lessons from the Caldera era, but it looks like Infinity Software was in the lead pre-launch given the tie-ins with its own Modern Warfare 2, and that sounds a little like a silo from the outside.
Things seem to be getting more tied up now but the backdrop of falling player counts and an anecdotal wave of unhappiness from subreddits and the wider community mean lessons need to be learnt this time.
After all, with a successful role model like Fortnite sitting right there demonstrating how incremental but non-stop updates can work better than wholesale “2.0” branding, Call of Duty must surely look at Warzone 2.0, by whatever name, as its “forever game” now - not one that it’ll can in two years' time.
Only by making improvements that don’t get erased by new launches can a game like this thrive in the truly long-term sense. The rapid shifting of priorities for Warzone 2.0 suggests that Activision has the appetite and financial motivation to turn things around.
Still, it’s hard to get away from the nagging sense, as an enthusiastic Warzone player, that even some cursory meetings with experienced players could have swerved its developers away from a large chunk of the mistakes made at Warzone 2.0’s launch. That’s a pretty confusing state of affairs.
Market research, and focus groups - these are often lampooned terms that can feel corporate and snake-oil-esque, but when a launch showcases this many odd calls that go on to be reversed this quickly, it suggests they need to be more readily considered.
The challenge of avoiding leaks and signing people to airtight NDAs is doubtless a scary one, but transparency is often its own reward in games marketing.
Warzone 2.0 still feels great to play, despite the friction that some of its changes have added - that’s a testament to how impressive its foundation is. We’re just hoping that the next year doesn’t see it shoot itself in the foot any more.
