To open the twentieth door of the RPS Advent Calendar, you’ll need to team up with some of your best friends, put on a parachute, and remember to check your angles.
It’s Call Of Duty: Warzone!
James: I don’t need to tell you what it was like this year. Scary, lonely; we’ve all been there. Isolation hit me bloody hard. Tensions from all walks of life melt into a giant ball of terror when you’re alone in a two-square-foot bedroom on the top floor of a 19th-century Kemptown mansion. In those long spring months, all I wanted to do was explore the beautiful city I had moved to, have new experiences and meet new friends. However, it doesn’t always work that way.
2020 is more about coping than anything else. Mourn the loss of opportunity, financial security, family members and relationships with no end in sight. For a long time I needed a constant.
Looking back, Warzone suited me perfectly. It got me through much of the year and gave me that constant source of literally everything my brain couldn’t get from the outside world. I had fallen off the Call Of Duty train a while ago and hadn’t gotten into any of the games properly since I wasted a ridiculous amount of time on Modern Warfare 2, but the 2019 Modern Warfare reboot immediately brought me back. Warzone, the game’s Battle Royale mode, was the perfect combination of familiarity and cool new stuff.
Warzone’s list of achievements is a mile long. The firefight feels satisfying, the best weapons are powerful and heavy in your virtual hands, and the elation of landing a sniper headshot to finish off the last member of an enemy squad is as intact as any polished AAA first person shooter. The map is varied, and the constant additional content and array of weapons and characters allow you to customize your experience to bring the best for you and your squad.
But to me, all the good things Warzone had was of secondary importance. After all, I would play it for work anyway. No, Warzone was my game of the year because other people liked it. It’s the first Battle Royale game, damn, the first game overall, that resonated enough with both me and a group of friends to the point where we can enjoy it together as if we were hopping online after school as soon as we finish homework.
Through all the bad backs and tough days, Warzone and the team I join have gotten through a really tough year. When you think of Warzone for what it is, it seems almost silly to put such an emotional weight on this ridiculous shooty bang bang game that lets you buy cannabis guns and anime trucks. Honestly, Call of Duty: Warzone is a blast, with all its brilliant limited-time modes (Armored Royale, I’m looking at you) and it’s one of those games that’s a joy to accompany. Any excuse to jump with the team in Verdansk is a pleasure for me.
Ed: James and I were in Verdansk together for most of the lockdown, and he pretty much summed up my thoughts on Warzone. For me, as much as it was for him, getting into The Boys after work on Discord and falling into Call Of Duty Battle Royale mode was an important way to connect with real human life forms.
We were actually all an ad for crossplay, too. Despite playing on a ton of different platforms, Warzone was an arena we could continue on anyway. As I write this article, I am reminded how brilliant this is. That we could – and still can – a ticket to Verdansk without even thinking about compatibility remains magical to me.
Warzone is also free to play. It is free. This experience costs nothing (except literally warehouses of SSD space) and it’s something that’s pretty easy to forget. Again it was perfect for those lockdown sessions as there was no monetary barrier, we could all get involved by simply clicking install.
I can’t shake the idea that it doesn’t cost money to play this game, probably because it’s so polished. It’s pretty much a live service mode stripped straight from £ 50 Call Of Duty: Modern Warfare. There’s no cheap price for graphics or gunplay here, it’s a triple A experience just funneled into a major multiplayer mode.
Having said all that, as the lockdown progressed I’m not sure we even cared about getting on top and securing that victory in Warzone. Ultimately, Verdansk became more of a chat room for us to express our frustrations, laugh, and just exist in a space that wasn’t our rooms. Basically a mental health tool that involved falling on a map, surviving poison gas, and shooting bad guys.