News - Why Was Warzone 2 Hated So Much
War Zone has now seen three different iterations across a four-year time span, and I would argue each has its own pros and cons. However, amongst the three, one stands out as the worst—the one universally hated by players—the middle child of the bunch, if you will. I'm, of course, talking about War Zone 2.
Today we're going to take a dive into why War Zone 2 was hated by many despite toying with a lot of fun concepts and implementing elements of War Zone that we still have today. I'm going to break this article down into eight categories, and we're going to take a look at what was bad or good about each one.
First and foremost, you have the movement. This is probably the biggest change to the overall gameplay, and most people were pissed about it. It's one thing to not have slide canceling, but for a minute there, you couldn't even run while plating up a pair with an extremely fast time to kill, and there are a ton of situations where you just can't do anything about surviving.
Seriously, if you had one bad circle pole, even if you were playing against an absolute brick, you could not do anything about it. On the plus side, we had the option of dolphin diving adding back to the game which I actually see as a huge plus. Aside from getting you behind cover in a pinch, it was discovered that dolphin diving off of a roof and immediately pulling your shoot would give you extra height that enabled jumps you normally couldn't make.
Abusing this on a map like Von Del was extremely satisfying and became a core mechanic for me that I still use in War Zone 3. I don't know; it seemed kind of like a way to level the playing field, but it honestly really didn't do that; it made it more unbalanced, in my opinion. The maps in War Zone 2 are actually a major strength of the game.
In my opinion, it is a pretty solid Battle Royale map with 150 players in each lobby. The pacing felt really nice for a large-scale map. Unfortunately, they decided to decrease the player count to 100, which ultimately ruined the entire flow of the map. I seriously have no idea why they decided to do that, but it's still made for some fun scenarios.
They just made games a lot duller; they're bright, vibrant, and filled with a ton of lovable characters. I know a lot of people didn't really enjoy the super mountainous terrain, but I thought it was a lot of fun and made for a really good time sniping. Then, once Resurgence was introduced, we had Asika Island, which is definitely the least favorite of the three which might I add I honestly don't know why I actually really like this map other than being kind of yucky and dark.
I think the map itself functions perfectly as a resurgence; the map may add like eight more to the player count to increase the pacing, but other than that, it's another win for War Zone 2, and lastly, there was Von Del, which has definitely become a fan favorite even today. I'm not even joking; I think Von Del could rival Rebirth Island, and how popular it's become with super-close range in almost every encounter makes for very fast-paced gameplay that the Resurgence Community loves.
Also, 72 people in each lobby enable high-kill gameplay to the max. 20+ kill games have never been easier than on Vond. All three maps result in a W for war zone. 2 besides movement, this is another one of the biggest changes that they made in War Zone 1. The looting system is far superior to War Zone 1's for a lot of reasons, for starters, to let you personalize your gameplay the way you wanted to, kind of like how a battle royale should, aside from your traditional lethal tactical ammo field upgrade self, kill streak armor, and gas map slots.
You now have six additional slots in your inventory to stash anything extra. I just said this made for a lot of fun and allowed your squad to be absolutely kitted to the max. If you wanted six self-revivals ready to go every time you went down, you could; if you wanted 12 smoke grenades to rotate across the entire map undetected, you could; if you wanted an inventory of rockets and go into full troll mode, you could do that too.
Obviously, I think this system should have been in War Zone 1, but it just makes the game feel way more strategic. You really had to make sacrifices as to what you wanted in your inventory and what you didn't want. There was even a period of time where you could find a medium or large backpack that not only expanded your inventory slots but also allowed for a third gun.
Such an awesome feature. I loved this so much. I wish they would bring it back running like your AR, your SMG, and then having a sniper was just like so much fun, but they removed that after season 1. I'm also going to go ahead and mention that on launch, the looting was a little bit different; it was honestly pretty despised because you had to look in each player's backpack and, kind of, manually sort through the inventory, kind of like a diet pubg, versus obviously what we know and love where just everything spills out on the ground, you can see what you need on the fly, and you don't really have to sort through anything.
It was really frustrating because you would search through someone's bag only for them to have nothing that you wanted, so you're just wasting time searching through things versus when it's on the ground, you know exactly what you want, and you can just pick it up and be on your way. We'll go ahead and mention armor satchels, which are also present in this state of the game as well.
Basically, you had to find an armor satchchel, and then that would have enabled you to have three plates of armor because by default you can only put in two, which was honestly, super dumb. Granted, the spawn rate was pretty abundant, but sometimes you just wouldn't find one, and you were stuck with just two armor plates the entire game, but luckily all those features I just mentioned were taken out after season 1 looting.
W, Now the Gunplay, this is another change that I do think was For worse, adding visual recoil to the game stinks. I honestly can't explain the science behind visual recoil, but this just makes hitting your shots so much more difficult than ever, and the people most affected are the mouse and keyboard players, aka me, which was just a massive kick in the balls.
The only saving grace was a much quicker TTK, which made things a little more forgiving but still much more difficult than in War Zone 1. I'll briefly go ahead and mention the metas, which I think were like some of the best war zones I've ever seen, like the Cronin Squall RPK. Hemlock AR and Lockman 556 were all a lot of fun, yeah, so in the middle of recording this.
