30 PCWorld APRIL 2020NEWS CALL OF DUTY’S FREE WARZONE SPINOFF
Duty: Warzone.
As I said, bring your friends. My biggest
disappointment with Warzone so far is the
lack of a Solo or even Duo mode. I’ve long
since tired of playing battle royale games with
strangers, and Warzone hasn’t changed that.
Warzone isn’t even as stranger-friendly as
Apex Legends. It does adopt the latter’s
excellent “ping” system to call out targets and
loot, but neglects to group teams together
when they jump out of the plane at the start of
a match. Every time I’ve played with strangers,
the match started with us spread across a
half-mile stretch of buildings desperately
trying to group back up. The only person I’ve
heard on comms so far was talking to his
Twitch viewers, not to me, and that about
sums up the experience of playing Call of
Duty: Warzone with strangers.
You can elect to enter a match without a
team, but you’re only hurting yourself. Your
opponents will still be three-person squads,and while Call of Duty’s faster time-to-kill
makes these matchups a bit more even than
they would be in PUBG or Fortnite, it’s still
borderline suicidal to go it alone.
It’s weird because unlike Apex, Call of
Duty doesn’t have any hero-specific skills or
whatever that necessitate (or at least
encourage) squadding up. My gut tells me
this is a marketing ploy, a way to get players to
coerce friends into giving Call of Duty:
Warzone a shot, but in my case it’s more likely
to get me to stop playing.
The long, lonely wait for a Solo mode
begins, I guess.
It’s a shame I’m so put off by playing with
randoms, because otherwise I love Warzone.
It’s Blackout—which I already loved—but
bigger and better. It’s paced like Fortnite but
skinned like PUBG, and it turns out that’s
exactly what I want: A semi-serious battle
royale game with minimal downtime.
PUBG had hotspots, but it never really felt
(at least when I used
to play) like it was set
up to support them.
People would drop
into Pochinki, but
decent loot was so
hard to come by that
a lot of those early
encounters turned
into slugfests, and if
you didn’t drop in
hot you might go