The worst-kept secret in the Call of Duty universe is now wide open: a brand-new, free-to-play shooter on both PC and consoles that revolves around, you guessed it, the battle royale genre.
Call of Duty: Warzone, whose existence leaked a month ago, received its first confirmed gameplay reveal early Monday morning via Chaos, a CoD enthusiast channel on YouTube. The 11-minute video appeared before we received any official statements from the series' publisher Activision.
Parachuting onto a giant video game landscape for the sake of a massive battle… where have we seen this before? Chaos / Activision The source video for these screens alleges that this giant map's various zones include callbacks to multiplayer maps from at least three other Modern Warfare games. Chaos / Activision Moooootion bluuuuur. Chaos / Activision This may look like a boring image to you, but it includes a pretty spiffy perk unseen in most battle royale games. When you land in Warzone, you get a pistol by default, so that you're no longer defenseless in a match's opening moments. Chaos / Activision This is not the outlandish, Bruckheimer-esque art direction of the Black Ops games. Chaos / Activision When you open a crate full of weapons, items, and ammo, there's no menu overlay. All the loot pops out for everyone nearby to see and rifle through. This is one of Warzone's unique quality-of-life perks. It also includes a "pinging" system, much like Apex Legends. Chaos / Activision
While many of the game's exact details are missing in the video, its raw gameplay footage confirms some major selling points. First, CoD: Warzone is the series' first free-to-play game on PCs and consoles (Xbox One, PlayStation 4). Chaos' video implies that owners of last year's Modern Warfare reboot will get either earlier access to the mode or exclusive customization content, but we don't have exact details how that will work at this time. The video also didn't include any footage of its real-money store, so we'll have to wait and see whether this free game includes paid options like a "battle pass" system.
The series already has a battle royale mode, attached to 2018's Black Ops 4, but Warzone (developed by Activision subsidiary Infinity Ward) seems determined to reduce BO4's emphasis on equippable gadgets. Instead, players are expected to earn and manage a temporary stockpile of cash while doing the battle royale song and dance (land on an island, then scavenge and survive against opponents while the shared battlefield is slowly shrunken by a poisonous cloud). Complete tasks or find loose cash on the ground, then find "buy stations" to acquire temporary super-powers (similar to prior games' "Kill Streaks") or to revive fallen teammates. (The last time we saw an emphasis on in-game cash in a battle royale game was 2018's short-lived Radical Heights.)
This debut gameplay video doesn't clearly show exactly how big Warzone's map is, even though it includes a zoomed-out map overview. But at a cursory glance, its full battlefield appears to be one of the biggest in the genre. That's likely by design, as Infinity Ward's first battle royale game supports 150-player battles by default, which exceeds the typical 100-player standard. Warzone also includes tRead More – Source
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