I submit to you this: Even if you think loadouts are the single most important thing in Warzone, loadouts aren’t actually the thing you love about Warzone. Let me explain. The biggest differentiating factor between Warzone and every other battle royale under the sun, from PUBG to Fortnite to Apex and everything in between, is Warzone is CoD. It looks like CoD, smells like CoD, and plays like CoD. Gunplay is tight and satisfying, and there’s little recoil to speak of, especially compared to something like PUBG. Framerates are high, everything feels fluid, and there’s the polish that only hundreds of millions of Activision dollars can get you. You’re playing Warzone because you wanted to play a CoD battle royale, not because you have to compare 17 different ‘Best XM4 Loadout’ articles to figure out which set of attachments is best and will keep you from getting beamed from a million miles away by a sweaty child without putting up a fight. Loadouts are definitely cool, but loadouts are a function of wanting your gun to perform well and, ultimately, kill people. If you could press a button in Warzone and get an automatically generated meta loadout, you’d probably press it and keep pressing it. But outside of being cool, loadouts do also bring them some serious balancing issues. See, the entire game of Warzone is basically about loadouts. You rush to land hot and get cash and guns as fast as possible so you can get the loadout as fast as possible, preferably before other teams get theirs and start actually using good guns. It’s not really about survival or winning, it’s about how much money you can get and how fast, because of loadouts. This undercuts a lot of the primary reasons for playing a battle royale. If you just wanted to spawn in with your loadouts and kill people, well, there’s CoD multiplayer. You play a battle royale because you want a little variety, you want luck to be relevant. You want big maps and slower gameplay than a team deathmatch. If Infinity Ward makes loadouts less of a crutch and something you’re just flatly at a disadvantage for not having as fast as possible, the flow of gameplay in Warzone can become a lot more dynamic and engaging. You know the feeling when you’re stuck with crappy Normal-tier guns in Fortnite for 75% of the game but then you get a lucky drop on a team, wipe them, and look at that, you’ve each found a Legendary weapon. Wow. Now you can start frying kids like patties at a burger joint. That’s a cool feeling, and it’s perpetual encouragement to keep playing because you might find something amazing right around the corner. Why not explore that building you’re walking by when a chest inside might have something truly game-changing in store for anybody who took the time to have a look? Warzone could have this feeling, but it doesn’t. In Warzone, you drop in, and chances are, within a few minutes (especially if you’re playing Fortune’s Keep or Rebirth) you’re getting your first loadout. Your first. Chances are you’ll probably want a Ghost loadout, too, and chances are your squad will have to regain at some point and at least one person might need a third, emergency loadout. At no point are you excited to find something rare and powerful, not really, but at every point, you are trying to get your guns so you’re not at a disadvantage, or you’re desperately trying to get back guns you’ve lost. All of this boils down to loadouts. A system, like we’ve seen in Warzone 2, where you can buy attachments at a Buy Station to kit out weapons and make them more powerful will be a nice middle-ground such that you can still use guns that feel good to shoot but we can have less of the endless, infinite loadout cycle. Imagine this: You and your squad are outside the circle, looking in. You know there’s activity further on in where you can hear a couple of teams fighting, but nobody appears to be in your immediate area, which is good because your buddy needs a new loadout, and you don’t have the cash for that right now. Time for some looting. So, you start checking buildings and opening crates. You watch your cash stack grow before your eyes. It’s great. Finally, you’ve enough for the loadout, so you all hop into a car and head to the Buy Station. You’re still pretty far out of the circle, so nobody’s around. So, you buy your loadout and breathe a sigh of relief, happily waiting for your crate to fall from the sky. But just as it does and your buddy’s grabbing his loadout, you get lasered from what feels like the other side of the map. Your buddy panics, picks the wrong loadout, and starts shooting off randomly into the distance when suddenly somebody pops up right behind you and hoses down the rest of your team, fully eliminating your squad from the game. It’s not a great feeling. But if everybody didn’t have not just super-accurate CoD guns but the best possible versions of these guns at all times, there would be fewer of these situations going around. You wouldn’t feel like there was constantly just about nothing you could do to outplay or outskill someone with a powerful gun that’ll take you down in a few shots regardless. With less of a reliance on loadouts, that feeling can be massively reduced in Warzone.
