In a nutshell: In a world saturated with battle-royale shooters, Activision thinks it has a twist on the formula that can attract enough attention to compete with the rest. The followup to Black Ops 4's BR mode Blackout, Warzone is a standalone, F2P, cross-platform, squad-based shooter. What a mouthful.
Call of Duty: Warzone joins the fray of battle royale titles tomorrow. Activision announced the free-to-play shooter's servers go live on Tuesday, March 10.
If you already own a copy of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, you can get early access to the free for all starting at 8am PDT tomorrow. Also, all of your Battle Pass items, skins, and weapons will carry over. However, you do not need to buy or own CoD: MW to play. You can download Warzone for free, but you won't get the carry-over perks and will also have to wait until noon to start playing.
Warzone will have two modes --- Battle Royale and Plunder. Battle Royale is more or less what you would suspect, except instead of playing one versus everyone else, players form three-person squads and fight to the last team standing. There can be up to 150 players per match. That works out to as many as 50 teams getting continuously squeezed together by a poisonous gas cloud.
Plunder is even more different. In Plunder matches, players race across the map looting caches of cash and completing contracts for money. When encountering other players, you can kill them and loot their earnings.
There is also a feature Activision calls "the Gulag." When you are taken out in battle, you wind up in prison with other players who have fallen. You have one chance to return to your squad by winning a one-on-one fight against one of the other prisoners. If you lose, you may still be able to rejoin your team if they earn enough cash to bail you out.
Battles take place in a location called Vandansk with multiple war zones. Some maps are in urban areas, while others are rural or forested. Activision says you can choose zones in match setup, although a random setting is not unimaginable.
Vehicles will play an essential role in getting around the map as well. There are five different modes of transportation with varying degrees of seating, protection, and other stats --- ATV, Tactical Rover, SUV, Cargo Truck, and Helicopter.
Call of Duty: Warzone will be available for PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC. It will also support cross-platform play, which Sony finally loosened up on last year. Activision warns that the game requires a whopping 101GB of storage, so be sure your your drive has room for it.