News - Warzone's New Update Is The Worst Yet
I don't think it would be dramatic of me today to say that the update for season 1 reloaded for War Zone is the worst we've ever seen. The update itself on paper looked fairly decent; there was a really good balancing pass to lmgs, a slight Nerf to one-hot sniper rifles, and the medium- to long-range meta was looking quite good.
The downsides were that the MTZ Interceptor was not going to be Nerf in this update, nor was the WSP Swarm, and those were coming in later updates. On top of that, the XVIII has been completely wiped out, but weapons cases aren't in the game in this update, and to add even more to the things that were missing, the actual ability to steal nuke contracts is not in season 1 reloaded.
So we've had a plethora of things that have been delayed and an update that on paper looked okay; there were some audio fixes, some map pass fixes, and things that generally looked quite positive, with the only major downside being the fact that there was less content, and generally speaking, the lack of a WSP swarm and intercept to Nerf looked pretty bad, but then the update came out, and honestly, it's been pretty horrific.
To start with, most people can't actually get into the game. There is a fetching profile death loop that stops people from getting into the war zone and doesn't allow them in the game, and if you do get in by dragging into a friend's party and playing quads, your game will brick itself if you use a loadout drop, and everything just doesn't work.
Loadout drops don't work if you take a loadout drop, and if you don't have the bug, you don't get your perks. And to prove to you guys that I'm not being dramatic, these are all of the bugs that I found in a 3-hour period. Other than the fact that there's no Nerf to the Interceptor or Swarm and the fact that cover XVM weapons cases are gone, the Champions Quest has been disabled because of a bug, air strike and mortar notifications do not appear in the game servers have been experiencing an extreme amount of lag, progression for all of the new guns and all of the new attachments appears to not work at the moment, the gro skin is now back into the game and doesn't appear to have had any substantial changes.
Ranking play for multiplayer has been delayed while they look into a major bug, and as specified, there is currently no timetable for when either the Champions Quest or ranked play will be returning, despite them being the two major points of this update. The events page that's also in the game appears to be not working for the vast majority of people, so overall, this update's been a disaster.
Most of the game doesn't actually work, and most of the new content for this update has been rescinded. It's been a full progression backwards. The balancing for the game has also made pretty much no sense, while the balancing parts that they added to the game made perfect sense in terms of balancing the mid-range, changing a couple things here and there, not including the MTZ Interceptor.
All the wsp Swarm in this equation meant that the ntz Interceptor has been inadvertently buffed because every other gun is now worse, and the wsp Swarm or the update that they're planning to do to Nerf only mentions the medium- to long-range damage of the swarm. not the fact that it has a 100-round magazine, not the fact that it has super tight hip fire, not the fact that the thing is just an all-round laser beam that beats absolutely everything.
Now it isn't all doom and gloom; there are a few silver linings to this update. To start with, frame rates across the board for people on PCs and consoles appear to be higher and more consistent. The brightness inside and outside a building seems to have been amplified in a really positive way that not only makes the game look more colorful without any kind of filter but also makes people more visible in the game.
They've changed some of the UI elements. The buy station looks a lot cleaner when you're being hunted with a contract and somebody's chasing you down; there's more of an alert system in place for that, and generally speaking, the audio improvements, although I've only had some limited time with them, do seem to generally improve the sound stage of War Zone.
I can't say for certain that it's going to be a universal improvement to the audio in War Zone, but so far it seems like somewhat of an upgrade, and when we did actually manage to get into a game where the servers weren't completely collapsing and the frame rate was working accordingly and everything was going somewhat fine, the game actually felt super smooth and super responsive, and some of these were nice positive changes, especially things like vaulting and certain zip lines being disabled to stop people glitching.
I will say, though, that they can't redeem the fact that most of the update content from this update is straight up missing, and a good percentage of people can't even play the game or they can't take their loadout drops without the game crashing. All things have been added to the War Zone Trell update board, but as of so far, two major pieces of content—the Champions Quest and ranked play—are completely gone, and honestly, most people just straight up can't get into the game.
There have been very few times in War Zone's history where I think an update has been worthy of them. absolutely rolling back an update, but this might be it. This might be one of the first times I can confidently say rolling back this update would be more beneficial to War Zone than keeping this update rolled out.
Now this entire situation speaks to a much larger issue in War Zone, and there's a couple of things I want to talk about before I wrap up this article. The first thing is that these integrations and War Zone itself need to stop doing major events in December. The game is always at its weakest around this time of year because they push major content updates like the release of War Zone Live, and then all of the developers go on holiday for Christmas.
Now, naturally, nobody is saying that any developer should be working crunch; nobody is saying that holidays shouldn't happen; and nobody is saying that developers should be working overtime during the Christmas period. That being said, it's on Activision and Raven software as teams to recognize that when you're running this large live service, releasing a major piece of content in December, and then trying to put together these updates in quick succession off the back of that holiday, it always ends up being a massive, massive failure.
It's the weakest time of the year for the war zone. It's when the metas are the most skilled, the cheaters are the highest, and the game tends to work at its least functional. And honestly, this entire update on paper sounded fantastic, but what's really been disappointing to me is the balancing element.
