Call of Duty: Warzone's been around for years now, and its problems, in many ways, haven't changed. And even now, with the new map and the new anti-cheat solution and years of updates, Warzone still isn't in a good state. Connections are unstable, balance is whacky, and many things players want they can't have. So, in this article, we'll explain why Call of Duty: Warzone is broken and won’t be fixed without a sequel: Warzone 2.
The Maps Problem in Warzone: The Story of Caldera, Verdansk, and Rebirth
Unlike other battle royale games, Warzone doesn't and hasn't ever had a variety of maps. At any given time, you're likely to have two options at most. People played on Verdansk and Rebirth for years, and they continue to play on Rebirth now alongside Caldera, and that's it.
A battle royale game needs a healthy rotation of maps to keep players interested and gameplay feeling fresh, there are no two ways around it. Look to every other major popular shooter: Do they only have a map or two? They probably don't, and it's for good reason.
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A huge part of why Warzone works how it does comes down to file size. Maps in Warzone take up so much space that it's not realistic to have multiple maps in a rotation. Players won't stomach a 300-400GB game, and many won't even bother to regularly download hundreds of gigabytes.
In part, Warzone works like this to facilitate the enormous amounts of asset streaming required to make a game like Warzone playable at 60FPS on last-gen consoles like PS4 and Xbox One. This is to say that it's not like the developers can simply implement some new kind of compression technology to massively reduce the size of maps unless they overhauled the game and stopped supporting PS4 and Xbox One.
Warzone 2 is rumored to be coming to only next-gen consoles like Series X and PS5, which would make sense, allowing maps to come in at a far smaller size such that the game can reasonably support multiple maps at a single time.
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Warzone's Integrations With Black Ops Cold War and Vanguard
There are no two ways about it: Adding Cold War and Vanguard content to Warzone has broken and continues to break the game. At the end of the day, Warzone was developed as a third side-mode to Modern Warfare (2019). It was never meant or intended to support a huge host of weaponry, especially not weapons from later Call of Duty games.
What this created was an endless struggle between making guns from other Call of Duty games look, feel, and perform at all like they do in their original games without totally ruining the balance of Warzone. Ultimately, this has meant that a lot of guns are just strictly better than other guns, which is terrible for a game's balance.
It's also led to numerous bugs and glitches, particularly with attachments not working or not changing whatever their descriptions say they will change. Plus, at any given point in Warzone's lifecycle the best guns to use are going to be from whatever game's guns were added last, which undercuts the game's huge library of weapons in a massive, perpetual way.
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This problem will never be meaningfully addressed in Warzone, at this point, because guns can't be removed from the game. People spend real-world money on guns in this game, so Activision can't possibly remove access to these kinds of purchases.
Warzone's Technical Problems and Engine Limitations
FOV, for example, why can't you adjust Warzone FOV on PS4 and Xbox One? Activision doesn't like to officially say it, but since it's been such a popularly demanded feature for so long, why the devs won't add it in has become pretty clear: last-gen consoles can't handle the increased rendering load of a changeable FOV at the game's 60FPS.
In general, Warzone's engine is that of Modern Warfare (2019), and Modern Warfare was not built to support a battle royale game with tons of maps, lots of weapons, and high-tier, fair, balanced competitive play. It was envisioned as a fun side-mode. Something like Blackout from Black Ops 4 or Fireteam from Cold War. Like Ranked Play in Vanguard.
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Accordingly, the kind of overhaul the engine would need to support all these things in an efficient, workable way is only doable with a sequel. Especially since this kind of thing just isn't going to be technically possible on the 2013-era hardware of the PS4 and Xbox One, and it's not like Activision will simply stop supporting Warzone on those platforms. Rather, they'll launch a sequel that simply doesn't ever come to PS4 or Xbox One.
Plus, Warzone 2 doesn't even necessarily need to be built with the weaponry of Modern Warfare II (2022) as well as future games in mind. Instead, Warzone 2 could opt into having its whole own unique set of weapons unique to that game and that game alone. Though, if Warzone 2 does get integrated into later Call of Duty games, at least it can be designed from the ground up to support such a feature.
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