News - The New Warzone Is Nearly Perfect
Next up is the new mosquito drone kill streak, which I think needs to be removed from the game in its current instance. The mosquito drone is not inherently clear where it is on the map; it sometimes doesn't appear correctly in the sky when it appears on the tack map, and it doesn't make enough audio when it dive bombs an opponent.
They are very easy to destroy, which does make them somewhat balanced, but right now, until they address the weird disconnect between the mini map and the mosquito drone being in the air. I don't think it's worth having in the game. There's a couple of UI elements as well that they've tried to change, and I don't think they've gone very well.
Feedback when you receive damage from enemy players just doesn't seem to actually promote any kind of psychological response. Which sounds like a weird thing to say. I think the problem with this is that the sound of gunshots is too similar to the sound of your armor plate taking damage. I think the armor plate needs to have a more distinctive sound to make it specifically clear that you are receiving damage and that somebody isn't just vaguely firing in your direction.
The general D sound just isn't distinctive enough; it needs to be more like a high-pitched sound or something that's just more obvious. I also have had a couple instances now where it isn't inherently clear if I have a self-revive. Now obviously, I equip myself with self-res all the time, but sometimes I forget I have one, and the self-res text only appears on the screen for like a fraction of a second, and then it disappears.
So I've actually given up in a few instances where I did actually have a self-revive, because it just wasn't inherently clear that it was there or that the alert popped up, but it wasn't obvious. I would much prefer a very bright green piece of text in the middle of my screen telling me I have a self-response rather than something very minimalistic that tries not to get in my way.
It goes without saying that this is going to be one of the most frustrating issues in the game, and that is mantling through Windows. The entirety of Ukan needs a pass on its window system. The windows right now do not automatically trigger properly. There are instances where I've been bumped into a window, haven't been able to mantle on one, haven't been able to jump through it, and it has gotten me killed on a number of occasions.
I was hoping this was just going to be something that was slightly broken in zombies and then it'd be fixed in the war zone, but that doesn't appear to be the case. The whole map just needs better snapping between Windows. When your character goes for a vault and it just needs to work better, this seems to appear most commonly when the ledge below the window is extremely low to the ground, which shouldn't be an issue for a war zone, and it's something that needs to be addressed.
And finally, the pistols are underwater. We need a change. I really love that you have a third weapon that you can bring out, but if you accidentally click triangle while you're underwater, you pick out your SMG or your LMG, which means that you cannot use the pistol and you physically have to leave the body of water and then re-enter it in order to get the automatic third pistol to show up again, which is just not an intuitive system.
I think if you're underwater and you press switch weapon, it will automatically go to your pistol, or if you hold triangle or hold switch weapon, it should pull out your third weapon slot, which is your pistol. The current system of it just automatically appearing does not work properly, and you're going to have to get in the habit of not pulling out your guns when you're in the water, otherwise you'll lose the advantage.
Overall, I think this version of War Zone is off to a really good start, and on the overarching side of things, there have been a lot of things that I've enjoyed and a lot of frustrations reduced. There are just a few things that seem to have slightly slipped through the gaps, and honestly, I think the most major one is clearly audio.
The other things I can kind of live with, but for me personally. I don't have that problem with audio because I'm using an ultra-specific setup to avoid that issue, but that's not something the average player should have to do, especially players on consoles who have far more limited options. The audio pass and audio shift need to occur, and audio should be priority number one in War Zone right now, and I hope we see some movement on that soon.
So that's about it for this article today, folks. Drop a like.