Call of Duty: Warzone is back

It is now time for Activision's franchise managers to realise what we gamers have been trying to tell them for years now: Warzone needs to be freed from the annual Call of Duty releases and the game needs to stay with Raven Software and not be tossed between studios that can't seem to cooperate. Let Warzone exist as its own product, with its own identity, and let Raven continue to boss it around with the support of High Moon and Beenox.

Because after Treyarch cancelled Warzone last November, it's been five months and the game has lost 80% of its active, regular players. Over 80% according to multiple industry sources. In an attempt to breathe new life into a dying battle royale game and try to lure back all the millions who left Warzone, stopped playing - Raven was put back in charge and Beenox (who made Al-Mazra and Vondel, two amazing maps) was tasked with upgrading Verdansk and beyond that; more or less erasing all the changes made in November 2024.

It was obvious, although not stated outright, in Activision's own 'patch notes' for yesterday's big update that the idea was to remove Omnimovement almost completely, reinstate the loot system with floating objects / weapons and the ability to shoot 9mm gun in the air, on the way down to the ground (from the aircraft), upgrade the server park at Demonware with machines that work at higher ticrate than 10-20Hz and try to get rid of the downright bizarre number of cheaters who occupied Warzone at the end. Of course, it's too early to say after one night whether they will succeed in luring back the bulk of lost players or not, but it's no mean feat to conclude after four hours of play that Raven Software has done great things here - just like Beenox. Because after five months of hopeless design decisions and rotten in-game performance, Call of Duty: Warzone once again feels like a working, fleshed-out game. Just like it did in September 2024. Just like it did in May 2020.

Omnimovement has been removed almost entirely which is a very welcome improvement and the movement now reminds me more of a mix between Modern Warfare III: Warzone and the 2020 game, the original. Sliding along the ground feels a little different to all of the previous versions as there seems to be a squeezed, short little delay in how your character performs their 'slide' which is just fine, if you ask me. There was, in my humble opinion, a touch of too much arcade smoothness in the way you moved in Warzone from 2019-2020 while Warzone 2.0 was demonstrably too heavy and slow for many players. Omnimovement and the way the game was experienced from November last year is, however, the single worst game feeling in Call of Duty: Warzone ever and that this has been a priority for Raven to fix in recent months is not particularly difficult to understand.

Furthermore, the graphics are back where they were last summer. The game looks great, again. Infinity Ward's absurdly deep assets library is now fully utilised again, the textures are high resolution (I'm playing on Playstation 5 Pro), the lighting is fantastic and the draw distance issues with anti-aliasing and blurry visibility from the snotty Treyarch map Area 99 are rubbed out. The sound is great, again - too. Incredibly better than it was in Black Ops 6: Warzone as of last November, when Activision decided to go back to the PS3 era in terms of audio and also took the opportunity to sell better in-game audio for real money in a game that didn't work. All of this has been fixed and I would argue that the acoustics and directional sound portion here is better than it ever was in Warzone.

What about Verdansk? Beenox have rebuilt the classic 2019 map in the new version of Infinity Ward's in-house game engine IW and done a brilliant job, here. They've refrained from making a bunch of changes to the architecture and structure (as rumoured last year) and instead stayed true to the extremely popular original, but updated models with more detail and texture work in general. Verdansk has never looked better and it was already apparent in game one how good this battle royale monolith really is. After all, Infinity Ward originally created this classic map which, along with Al-Mazra, is the best thing Activision has ever done in terms of maps. I just hope that Verdansk gets to stay, forever, and that Raven solves a map selector function and also puts in Al-Mazra and Vondel, again.

After the first full night back at Verdansk, I'm saying a silent prayer now that Treyarch doesn't get to stir the Warzone pot any more, ever, and that Activision now realises that this game mechanic, this combination of game systems, this game feel and this version of Warzone is what people want to play. By all means, let Warzone live as its own product, not tied to the annual, numbered Call of Duty release, and with thoughtful, quirky updates to an already working game, rather than replacing things that players like, just for the sake of it.