To open the twentieth door on the RPS Advent Calendar you should remember to check out some of the best friends, straps on the parachute, and your corners.
It is the duty of Call: Dz Zone!
James: I don’t need to tell you how this year went. Scary, lonely; We’ve all been through it. Isolation hit me too bad too. When you’re alone in a two-meter square bedroom on the top floor of a 19th-century Kemptown mansion, stress from every corner of life melts into a huge ball of terror. In this long spring month, I want to explore the beautiful city I have moved to, discover new experiences and make new friends. Things don’t always work that way.
2020 has become more about coping than anything else. Opportunity, financial security, mourning the loss of family members and relationships, no end in sight. For a long time I needed constant.
Looking back, Warzone fits me perfectly. It got me a huge amount of years and gave me that my brain is a constant source of literally nothing I can get from the outside world. I had just fallen off a Call of Duty train, and I couldn’t get into any games properly because Modern Warfare had a ridiculous time at 2 o’clock in the day, but the 2019 Modern Warfare reboot brought me up immediately. Back. The game’s battle was a perfect combination of royal mode, zoning, familiarity and new content.
The list of Warzone’s achievements is one mile long. The gunplay sounds satisfying, the best guns are powerful and heavy in your virtual hands, and the pleasure of landing a sniper headshot to finish the final member of the enemy squad is as intact as any polished AAA first person shooter. The map is varied, and the constant extra content and range of weapons and characters means you can customize your experience to bring out the best for both you and your team.
For me, though, all the good stuff near the War Zone was secondary. I’ll play anyway to work, after all. No, ZZ was my game of the year because other people loved it. It’s the first Battle Royale game, hell, usually the first game, which resonates enough with both me and a group of friends where we can enjoy it as much as we’d hope to hop offline after school as we finished. Out of homework.
During all the bad backs and difficult days, Warzone and the team I drop in with have gotten me through really rough years. Thinking about what Verzon is, it seems almost foolish to combine such an emotional weight with this ridiculous Shooty Bang Bang game that lets you buy sleep guns and anime trucks. Honestly though, Call of Duty: Warzone is a banger, with all its brilliant limited time modes (Armored Royal, I See You) and it’s one of those games that is fun to guide. Any excuse to jump into Verdansk with the team is a pleasure for me.
Ad: James Verdansk and I were together for most of the downfall, and he collected my thoughts on Warzone nicely. For me, it was as much for her as it was for her to get into a dispute with The Boys after work and fall into the Battle Royale mode of Call of Duty was an important way to connect with real human life forms.
We were all basically also advertising for crossplay. Despite us playing on a bunch of different platforms, Warzone was a field that let us explode regardless. As I write this article, I am reminded of how brilliant this is. We were able to grab a Verdansk ticket without even thinking about compatibility – and still do – remains magical for me.
Warzone is also free to play. This is free. This experience costs nothing (except literally warehouses of SSD space) and is something that is very easy to forget. Again, it was perfect for lockdown sessions because there is no financial constraint, we can all be included just by clicking install.
I can’t get rid of the idea that it doesn’t cost money to play this game, because it’s so polished. It’s a very live service mode that seems to strip uty 50 directly from Call of Duty: Modern Warfare. There’s no getting cheap here on graphics or gun play, it’s a triple the experience, just funnel into a larger multiplayer mode.
Having said all this, like wearing a lockdown I’m not sure we’ve even taken care to secure that Voson victory by coming to the top. In the end, Verdansk became one more chatroom to transmit our frustrations, to gain control, and to survive in a space that was not in our room. Essentially a mental health tool that includes falling on the map, avoiding poison gas and shooting baddies.
