To open the twentieth door of the RPS Advent calendar, you’ll need to accompany some of your best friends, tie yourself up with a parachute, and remember to check corners.
It’s Call Of Duty: Warzone!
James: I don’t need to tell you how it has been this year. Scary, lonely; we’ve all been through it. The isolation hit me pretty damn. Tensions in every corner of life melt into a giant ball of terror when you’re alone in a two-foot square bedroom on the top floor of a 19th-century Kemptown mansion. In those long spring months, all I wanted was to explore the beautiful city where I had moved, find new experiences, and meet new friends. But things don’t always work out that way.
2020 has become more of a confrontation than anything else. Pain for lost opportunities, financial security, family members and relationships, endless in sight. For a long time I needed a constant.
Looking back, Warzone suited me perfectly. It made me spend a lot of the year and gave me this constant source of literally anything my brain couldn’t get from the outside world. It had been a long time since I had dropped off the Call Of Duty train and hadn’t gotten into any of the games properly since I took a ridiculous amount of time to Modern Warfare 2, but the 2019 Modern Warfare reboot took me to back. Warzone, the game’s Battle Royale mode, was the perfect combination of familiarity and new, fun stuff.
Warzone’s achievement list goes a mile. The shooting game is satisfying, the best weapons are powerful and heavy in your virtual hands and the effort of reaching a sniper shot to kill the last member of an enemy squadron is as intact as any sniper in first person AAA. The map is varied and the constant additional content and range of weapons and characters allow you to customize your experience to offer the best for you and your staff.
But for me, all the good that Warzone had was secondary. After all, I would play it anyway for work. No, Warzone was my game of the year because other people liked it. It’s the first game of Battle Royale, Hell, the first game in general, which has had enough resonance with both me and a group of friends to the point of enjoying it together as if we were jumping online after school. as soon as we finished out of homework.
Through the bad backs and hard days, Warzone and the squad I fell with have made me have a very tough year. Thinking about Warzone for what it is, it seems almost silly to assign an emotional weight to this ridiculous bang bang game that allows you to buy grass weapons and anime trucks. Honestly though, Call of Duty: Warzone is a banger, with all its brilliant limited time modes (Armored Royale, I’m watching you) and it’s one of those games that’s a joy to guide. Any excuse to jump into Verdansk with the squad is a delight to me.
Ed: James and I were together in Verdansk for most of the blockade, and he summed up my thoughts on the war zone pretty well. For me, as much as for him, getting into Discord with The Boys after work and switching to the actual battle mode of Call Of Duty was an important way to connect with the real forms of human life.
Basically, we were all a crossplay ad. Although we played on a lot of different platforms, Warzone was a field that allowed us to play independently. As I write this article, it reminds me how brilliant it is. That we are able to catch a ticket to Verdansk (and still are) without even thinking about compatibility, remains magical to me.
Warzone is also free to play. It’s free. This experience costs nothing (apart from literally SSD storage) and is something that is easy to forget. Again, it was perfect for these blocking sessions, as there was no monetary barrier; we could all participate simply by clicking Install.
I can’t ignore the idea that playing this game doesn’t cost money, probably because it’s so polished. It’s practically a live service mode that feels deviated from Call Of Duty: Modern Warfare, £ 50. There’s no cheapening of graphics or gun games here, it’s a triple A experience, which just becomes a great multiplayer mode.
That said, as the blockade was blocked, I’m not sure we even cared to get out in the first position and get the war zone victory. In the end, Verdansk became a chat room for us to express our frustrations, have a figure and just exist in a space that was not our rooms. Essentially, a mental health tool that involved falling off a map, surviving toxic gas, and shooting bad guys.