Warzone, if you played before, plays much better in squads than it does in solos. Solos aren’t bad: they can be an adrenaline-packed rush that makes you feel like a champion when you pull down the win. The problem, though, is that the exact reason why solos can be so fun is also why it’s largely a frustrating mode that few take that seriously: the chaos. The problem with playing Call of Duty in what is essentially a very, very large game of free-for-all is the same problem you get with normal free-for-fall but much more intense. The problem with the chaos is that it’s all too easy to just get gunned down and booted from your game without even knowing what happened or having even a slim chance of being able to fight back. Even if you’re a cracked content creator, solos are generally a pretty punishing grind because of the fundamental nature of the mode’s randomness. In a lot of ways, there just isn’t anything you could have done a lot of the time when it comes to you dying, and when you die in a battle royale, that’s game over, outside of your last chance with a gulag fight. By all accounts, DMZ looks to be less dependent on squads. You aren’t going to be playing a huge free-for-all or squad-based team deathmatch, you’re going to be loading into a big map with a list of different things you can do and objectives you can complete, some of which include trying to kill as many other players as possible. Say you just want to do a quick, chill game where you take down an A.I. stronghold, get your loot, and go to prepare for a more intense, more PVP-focused session later when your friends are actually around. Or say you’re trying to complete exploration objectives and get to every major section of the map. Or maybe you’re trying to find a couple of specific items in one game. All of these kinds of objectives are inherently a lot less reliant on having a squad that can revive you, and what’s more, since these are ways to play, people will play these ways, ultimately cutting down on how many people are sitting in corners the whole game waiting for a kill. In a lot of ways, one of the main existential problems of modern Call of Duty games comes down to progression. There isn’t really a reason to win a game or perform particularly well, because you aren’t really rewarded for that. Beyond that, there isn’t even really the satisfaction at getting better at the game and thus being able to win or perform well, because of the SBMM in modern CoD games. Sure, you can grind for camos, but once you have your camos, which you only grinded for to be able to show them off, it can quickly feel like a chore to play. You can grind to level up your guns, but leveling guns never really feels good, it just feels like you’re losing gunfights for a while because you have bad guns, and then you are eventually able to not do that. Your Season Rank doesn’t really matter, and XP doesn’t really matter that much, either. To a very real extent, you play CoD to play CoD. One game doesn’t really fold that much into another game. Enter DMZ, which is set to change a lot of this and actually give gamers a real sense of progression when playing Call of Duty. With a loot-and-extract type gamemode, the whole point of it is to start out with nothing and slowly build up a storehouse of powerful weapons and gear that let you take on the game’s most dangerous and most rewarding objectives, which in turn shower you with even more powerful weapons and gear. Then, of course, there can also be a whole resource economy that folds into the above, enabling you to customize gear, build things, etcetera. Plus, this kind of game mode perpetuates itself. If you risk losing your gear when you die in DMZ, eventually you will lose something, which will encourage you to try and get what you lost back and then something even better, which you’ll be better equipped to do the more you play. It’s not a complicated system, nor is it especially revolutionary, but it will provide an actual level of progression that CoD multiplayer and Warzone so often lack. What do you do in Call of Duty? It’s not a trick question: you kill people. That’s about it. Whether you’re in a squad in Warzone or you’re playing multiplayer or even Zombies, you’re killing enemies. That’s what you do. Now, it is a shooter, of course, so you’d expect that, but even within that context, it’s fun to have variety. DMZ is set to introduce variety. This isn’t a team deathmatch or a free-for-fall. Rumored objectives in DMZ include a lot of things. Yes, there are inevitably going to be kill-based objectives, but even then, encouraging gamers to use shotguns and snipers as much as submachine guns and assault rifles is going to introduce a lot of variety within playstyles. Then, there are rumored to be exploration objectives, where you go to certain locations on the map. There are rumored item collection objectives where you’re supposed to search for and find certain things within a game. There are rumored to be A.I. stronghold takedown objectives where you’ve got to fight enemy A.I. all the while looking out for real players. Plus, there could be a host of other stuff. What if there are resources or cash in the game, and then there are a bunch of objectives surrounding simply acquiring these resources and extracting them such that you can upgrade your gear or weapons? DMZ is slated to come with a ton of different ways to play that aren’t found in Warzone or CoD multiplayer, and turning CoD into a sandbox where you can do much more of what you want is an exciting level of freedom.
