To open the twentieth door on the RPS Advent Calendar you have to go up with some of your best friends, strap on a parachute, and remember to check your corners.
It’s Call Of Duty: Warzone!
James: I don’t have to tell you how this year has been. Scary, lonely; we have all been through it. Remotely I hit pretty damn hard. Pressures from all walks of life melt into a huge ball of horror when you are alone in a two-square-meter bedroom on the top floor of a 19th-century Kemptown mansion. In those long spring months, I just wanted to explore the beautiful city I moved to, discover new experiences, and meet new friends. Things don’t always work that way.
2020 has become more about dealing than anything else. Mourning the loss of opportunity, financial security, family members, and relationships, endless in sight. For a long time I needed a stable.
Looking back, Warzone fits me perfectly. It got me through a lot of the year and gave me that constant source of literally anything my brain couldn’t get from the outside world. I had fallen off the Call Of Duty train a while back, and hadn’t gotten into any of the games since I put a lot of time away on Modern Warfare 2 back in the day, but a relapse Modern Warfare 2019 I am right back. Warzone, the Battle Royale mode of the game, was a perfect combination of experience and cool new stuff.
The list of Warzone achievements is a mile long. The gunplay feels satisfying, the best guns are powerful and heavy in your hands, and the creep lands with a sniper pin to finish off the last ball of an enemy squad as complete as AAA smart first-person shooter. The map is mixed, and the content and range of additional weapons and stable characters means you can customize your knowledge to give you and your squad the best.
For me, though, all that good Warzone high school was all about. I would at least play it for work, after all. No, Warzone was my game of the year because other people liked it. This is the first Battle Royale game, hell, the first game in general, that has been expressed enough by myself and a group of friends to the point where we enjoy it together as if we are hopping online after school as soon as we are done with homework.
Through all the bad backdrops and difficult days, Warzone, and the squad I visit, have taken me through a very rough year. Thinking of Warzone for all that, it seems almost silly to associate such emotional pressure with this rusty bang bang bang game that lets you buy herb guns and anime trucks. Honestly though, Call of Duty: Warzone is a banger, with all the cool time-limited modes (Armored Royale, I’m looking at you) and it’s one of those games that delights to lead. Any excuse for jumping into Verdansk with the squad is a pleasure for me.
Ed: James and I were out in Verdansk together for most of the lockout, and have nicely gathered my thoughts on Warzone. For me, as good as it was, getting Discord with the Boys after work and falling into the Call Of Duty battle royale mode was an important way to connect with real life forms. .
We were all basically an advertisement for crossplay as well. Despite playing on a handful of different platforms, Warzone was one area that allowed us to crack nonetheless. As I write this article, I am reminded of how brilliant this is. That we were able – and still are – to grab a ticket to Verdansk without even thinking about compatibility remains magical to me.
Warzone is free to play too. It’s free. This experience costs nothing (other than literal storage of SSD space) and is something that is pretty easy to forget. Again, it was perfect for those locking sessions because there was no cash barrier, we could all get involved just by clicking install.
I can’t shake the idea that it won’t cost money to play this game, probably because it’s so neat. It’s basically a live service mode that feels like it was just removed from the £ 50 Call Of Duty: Modern Warfare. There’s no buying out graphics or gun play here, it’s a three-pronged experience, just turned into a great multiplayer mode.
Despite all this, as locking would go I am not sure that we even cared about emerging and consolidating that impact at Warzone. Eventually, Verdansk became more of a chat room for us to express our displeasure, to have a chortle, and just to be in a place that we didn’t have the rooms. In fact a mental health tool that happened by falling on a map, surviving poison gas, and burning baddies.