News - Early Warzone 2 Season 1 Gameplay, Riot Shield Nerf, More Dev Insights
And I captured this with a sledgehammer.
New maps (meat, greece, rio, & training facility)
And the first game play you're seeing here is on the map called Meat, and it is quite a small map, as you may or may not have noticed by now, although I would say it's at least big enough that there's a little bit of room to breathe and a little bit of room to think about what you're doing. It's not like a shipment or rust, for instance, and I do quite like that there's a lot of action to be found, but it's not completely mindless chaos.
After that, at the launch of season 1, we're going to have access to grease, and here's some gameplay on that map, and I actually really liked grease. Grease is a more medium- to even-large map, is how I would describe it. It is a very linear map, and there's a decent amount of complexity as well.
There are lots of different areas where you can cut between the various lanes. There's also water on this map, so you will be able to implement water into your gameplay, but I did find that the water is not really necessary. As part of the gameplay on this map, you can use it if you'd like to, but I never really felt like I needed to go into the water in order to navigate the map properly.
But then after that, we have Rio, and this one isn't coming with the launch of season 1; it is coming later on in the season, and with this one, I describe it as medium-sized. Map There's a main building in the middle it's a mall or something like that and at least when I played this at the studio that's kind of where everyone was gravitating toward and that's where most of the fighting was taking place whereas all of the areas around that middle building, are more open areas that are designed much more for flanking and that's generally what I was trying to do is flank around and then shoot people in the back while they're fighting in the middle and those are the three brand new 6v6, maps we're going to be getting throughout season 1, and honestly based on the limited experience I had I don't really have any serious complaints with any of them I do have some concerns about spawns on meat but I mean anytime you have a map that small and you're playing 6v6.
New guns (ram-7, xrk stalker, stormender )
Unfortunately in the build that we had access to we were limited to just the ram 7 the xrk stalker sniper rifle and the storm Ender launcher, which is an energy launcher that's not really designed to kill enemy players just designed to take out streaks and equipment, and unfortunately I actually forgot to use that launcher I intended on doing it but there was so much else going on I just for got to put it on my class setup to be honest so the vast majority of my gameplay time was using the ram 7, and here are the advanced stats with the ram 7 by the way it also looks like we may be seeing improvements to the advanced stats page we're getting a few more stats and a little bit more detail.
New advanced stats (ram-7 stats)
In either case, when it comes to the ram, statistically, like time to kill, it's pretty good for an assault rifle, especially if you can land a head shot. Just one head shot up close is going to make a big difference. However, unlike most of the time when we have access to play the game early at a studio like this.
Of some of the current maps we have in the game, we aren't allowed to upload footage of those maps; those are coming later on in the season, and that just wasn't meant to be the focus of this event. They let us play around with them a little bit, but it was not for capturing purposes. All I can say about the XTK stalker is that it seems like it's just a good all-around Modern Warfare 3 Sniper Rifle, which I feel is kind of missing from the game in its current state where it's just got like a solid one-shot kill potential, but it's also reasonable.
Riot shield rebalancing details
Now let's finally get into all of the details of things that we learned about while at this event. Like I said, there was a Q&A session with this, and we did gather quite a bit of information on little things, and I mean, one thing that I think many people are going to be happy to see is that maybe some people will be disappointed.
Is they're rebalancing, the riot shield, finally, and they're doing exactly what I wanted them to do with the riot shield what they're going to be doing with this is there's now going to be a movement penalty even when that Riot Shield's on your back so no more turtling and still zipping around the map like a madman you are going to be noticeably slowed down when you have a riot shield equipped whether it's out or on your back however in order to compensate for that and in order to not make the riot shield completely useless, they're also rebuffing, the melee damage so it's going to be a twoh hit kill with the shield again, unlike the current three hit kill so it's actually going to be a little bit more powerful.
If you're using it as a shield and you've got it out in front of you, it'll be noticeably nerfed for those people who are just using it for the sole purpose of having their back protected.
Swarm & emp initial impressions
While using a regular gun in the game so to me this sounds great I'm really excited to see what this change actually looks like in game but on paper at least it's sounding excellent , next up they did confirm that cold blooded should be fixed for season 1 so that's good news we haven't had access to cold blooded this entire game up until this point , and that's especially good because the Swarm is coming to the game which by the way somebody did earn a swarm in one of the games but again this was when we were playing on the vortex map so I can't show it to you, however that one time that the Swarm was called in it honestly didn't seem all that powerful it only got I think like four kills for him so I am curious to see more with this obviously we just saw it called in once maybe he just happened to get unlucky that game and didn't get very many kills so time will tell on this one but I'm a little concerned this might not be as powerful as it should be for a super high-end streak, additionally in that same game that player also earned an EMP.
And the EMP is very powerful in the state that it was in the build that we played because it eliminates literally every single heads-up display element in the entire game, including player indicators above their heads, which means you can't even tell if you're shooting at a teammate or an enemy when an enemy has an EMP in the air.
In fact. I don't think you even get hit markers that appear on your screen; there's just nothing, and that could be a problem, especially in hardcore game modes, because there is literally no way of knowing if it's a friendly or an enemy that you're looking at any given point with the EMP in the air, so I do think that needs a little bit of rebalancing.
