In many ways, Call of Duty: Warzone 2.0‘s recent Season 2 update steered the game back on course, adding meaningful quality-of-life improvements and new features across the board. Despite those positive changes, Warzone 2.0 is still plagued with issues, many of which have pushed veteran players away.
Given just how substantial the Season 2 update was, and what we know about Season 3, things are looking bright for Warzone 2.0. But which features need to be added alongside the upcoming season? The day Season 2 went live, Activision revealed that a few features will be added in Season 3 and beyond. These include a Gunfight mode in Modern Warfare 2, the introduction of Plunder in Warzone 2.0, and a ranked Warzone mode. It’s unclear when exactly these features will come to the game, but they’re in the works and will hopefully launch soon.
Season 02 is almost live, and there’s even more on the way. Here’s a taste of what’s next 👇
Season 02 Reloaded:
🗻 New Core 6v6 Multiplayer Map
🚨 New RAID episode
🔥 New Multiplayer Modes
Season 03 and beyond:
🔫 Gunfight
💰 Plunder
🪂 Warzone Ranked
— Call of Duty (@CallofDuty) February 15, 2023
While those are some potentially exciting additions, there’s still a bit more that the game could use to fill in some of its current cracks. These are five features we’d love to see implemented during Warzone 2.0 Season 3.
One of the most frustrating aspects of Warzone 2.0 is building loadouts — or at least, building competitive loadouts by solely relying on in-game stats. Each weapon attachment has multiple stats associated with it, indicating the damage, fire rate, range, and other factors. The problem is that each stat is only represented by an ambiguous bar, with no number associated with it, making it nearly impossible to know just how effective an attachment is.
These attachments also have a list of pros and cons for balancing purposes, but in many cases, they either have wrong information or hidden factors. For instance, the Ares Clear Shot Optic actually helps with recoil stabilization, but it doesn’t actually tell you that within the Gunsmith. There are likely other attachments with hidden stats as well. For Season 3, we’d love to see specific numbers tied to each attachment, just like in Black Ops Cold War. This way, players wouldn’t have to rely on YouTubers to know which builds are the best.
While Season 2 introduced a long list of weapon-balancing improvements, there’s more to be done in this regard. Prior to Season 2, the two best weapons were the Fennec 45 SMG and the RPK LMG. Both of these weapons received small nerfs during Season 2, but they’re still dominant and need to be tweaked a little more. While the Fennec and RPK aren’t overpowered, there isn’t much of a reason to use anything else, so we’d like to be able to use a wider range of weapons during Season 3.
Speaking of weapon balancing, we’d love to see one-shot snipers in the shooter’s next season, as snipers are practically useless currently since they cannot secure one-hit eliminations.
For whatever reason, Warzone 2.0 features AI bots. This is a controversial feature that many players are not in favor of. Season 2’s new Ashika Island recently added AI bots, which interrupt the flow of matches. Even if the bots themselves aren’t too deadly, they do serve as a distraction that makes it easy for other players to take you out while your attention is focused elsewhere. Ultimately, bots don’t add much to the current game, and Season 3 might be better off if it finally ditches them.
In terms of moment-to-moment gameplay, Warzone 2.0 has an issue with its time to kill (TTK). You can take someone down in the blink of an eye, giving players almost no time to react. In essence, this means you’ll likely get eliminated if an enemy player sees you first, which gets frustrating quickly. There are a few ways to improve the TTK in a game, including an increase to base player health. That change occurred in the original Warzone, wherein player health was increased by 50 for a total of 300 (with full armor plates). This might not sound like much, but it could very well improve the pacing, even slightly, if implemented in Warzone 2.0. As it stands, gunfights are blisteringly fast, so we hope Season 3 will rectify this.
We know a ranked mode is coming, possibly as soon as Season 3, which is certainly a win for the community. While that’s great news for players looking for a fair challenge (assuming it works the way it did in previous COD entries), we’d love to see the introduction of a casual mode as well. Skill-based matchmaking (SBMM) has been a point of contention for years now, as many players would rather get thrown into matches with random opponents instead of against equally skilled enemies.
Strict SBMM tends to keep things stagnant for some players, so having a casual mode alongside ranked could work well. A casual mode with no SBMM would throw players into matches with a wide range of players, offering far more variety in each game. We’d love to see a casual mode added during Season 3, but our expectations for that are low based on how much work is needed elsewhere at present.
Acer’s Predator Atlas 8 finally has a US release date and price, several months after the company first showed off the handheld in May. The highlight is the Intel Arc G3 Extreme chip inside, which has been adopted by only a couple of other consoles besides the Atlas 8. This version will go on sale exclusively at Best Buy on November 1 for $1,299.99.
Acer originally said the Atlas 8 would arrive in North America in October, but left pricing open at the time. The launch came amid the ongoing DRAM crunch, which has made memory more expensive across the PC industry and complicated pricing for hardware makers.
Gaming laptops and I have a complicated relationship. One of my first gaming rigs was an Acer Predator that was already outdated when I bought it. I was a broke college kid, and that was the best I could afford. So trying out high-end gaming laptops is always fun. But ASUS' ROG Zephyrus G14 is a lot more than a laptop that can run AAA games. It is portable, so you're not lugging around a 2.5kg machine everywhere you go. It is built well, none of that plastic chassis, and can even function as a normal laptop outside of just gaming.
Google Play is borrowing one of the Nintendo Switch’s most useful little tricks. A new Sidekick tool called Playbacks captures a short clip after something interesting has already happened, sparing players from running a screen recorder throughout an entire game.
Playbacks is part of Google Play Store v53.8 and keeps saved clips on the phone. Google first announced it earlier this month, but the new Play Store update marks its arrival for players. Anyone who has watched a perfect win vanish because the record button came too late already understands the appeal.