The state of Call of Duty: Warzone 2.0 is shameful

I can't let it go. I should, because I've played my last Call of Duty: Warzone 2.0 game until Raven Software's version of Activision's battle royale is reintroduced. I'll be back. As long as it's Call of Duty: Black Ops 6's Warzone on offer, I won't touch the game again. But I can't let go of the destruction of a great game that happened last Thursday.

There is today only one big-name battle royale experience of this kind that doesn't run its servers at a tick rate of 60Hz or more. And that game is called Call of Duty: Warzone 2.0. Fortnite used to run at 30Hz but has upgraded all its servers to 60Hz while Apex Legends and Playerunknown's Battlegrounds run with 60Hz servers too. Warzone? 20. They run a tick rate of 20Hz, which has been unacceptable for many years and has caused many strange firefights where the difference between "time-to-kill" and "time-until-death" has differed too much to be considered "fair" between different players. Parts of Warzone's online battles have felt like a lottery over the years due to the poor quality of the servers.

The reason why, as in Activision's case, they only run their servers at 20Hz instead of 60Hz like their competitors (the Counter-Strike 2 servers run at 128Hz) is because of money. It's much, much cheaper than cranking it up to three times the tick rate. Moreover, it's for the same reason that Activision removes super-popular maps like Al-Mazrah, Ashika, Vondel, and Fortune's Keep when a new map is rolled out. They could offer everything, but by removing all the old stuff, they save money. This is despite the fact that Warzone, like the rest of the Call of Duty sphere, generates a shocking amount of money in terms of pure profit (the mobile game alone has generated billions in revenue).

The 20Hz tick rate in the servers has long been a problem in Warzone but it worked better than ever in the last few months. However, the problems have increased as Treyarch has added Omnimovement to Warzone, which makes players move more and at a much faster pace. Something that is not supported by the slow servers that only update 20 times per second. You only need to play three games to feel how the dissonance between ultra-fast movement and slow server refresh rates doesn't work. The game guesses and predicts where things should be, such as who shot first and often where the player you're shooting at is now standing.

It's now more noticeable than ever that bullets are clumped together, too. 20Hz is not enough (not by a long shot) to map and update the server information, as instead it seems to be more about sending whole packets of bullets through the servers that often reach the one you are shooting at in one and the same data package, via the server. This often results in me, as a player, dying before I even have time to react and that my view of the encounter itself differs significantly from what it actually looks like in the "killcam" from the opponent's point of view. This is purely because the game is too fast and the rate of fire is too fast for the slow and budget servers to keep up.

On top of that, the graphics (as I've written about before) are markedly worse than in Modern Warfare III's Warzone, not to mention the sound. Just when Raven finally got the sound/acoustics right in Modern Warfare III's Warzone, Treyarch threw us back to 2019 and a soundscape that, without exaggeration, is completely helpless. Shameful, is what it is. Thoroughly shameful that the world's biggest game publisher would even consider allowing the release of a product like this.