News - Warzone Update Review (the Good Stuff)
Welcome to part one of my War Zone review for Modern Warfare 3's massive season 1 update. Part two is going to be all the negatives, but part one is going to be focusing on the positives. The things I like are the positive direction the game is taking, the great colors on the map, and things like that.
the complaints The balance issues are all going to be put in a different article. All of the gameplay today is PC gameplay, but it's actually from three different builds: high, medium, and low spec. I didn't post this one because that's just not enough time to really judge a battle royale. I needed more play time.
I needed to get into the game and get a feel for it. What you're watching right now is actually my very first deployment, and I decided just to let Yolo land on the train. We're going to go ahead and start off with all the good stuff, with number one being a silly thing like an Archer joke you can drive—the train.
I love that I love that the train has a buy-in station guaranteed to drop you off. You can stop it and make it go backward. All sorts of fun stuff, and that's really the theme carrying through this article, is that it seems like Sledgehammer really wanted to focus on making war zones fun. The design goal seems to be to return to war zone 1 verdance, kind of Vibes, which I'm all here for because it was my personal favorite war zone experience, not just because it was the first.
I just think it was actually the best, and Sledgehammer put a greater emphasis on fun instead of competitiveness, so let's start off with some of those new fun things. First up, all of the New Movement mechanics from Modern Warfare 3 multiplayer have been ported over into War Zone, and they work quite well here.
It's really easy to mantle, climb, and slide to do all of the things that you want to do in Call of Duty. So, I think that's a posit we talked about that in the regular review we don't have to focus too much on it. I think that's all positive. I'm all here for faster movement. But they wanted to do more for the war zone, so they added loads of zip lines all over the map.
It's way easier to get up, down, and off of buildings. They even added a whole bunch of horizontal zip lines, so whereas previously people would hold the roof of a building, you'd have to brutally push up the stairs or go to another building and jump off. Now you're much more likely to be able to find a zipline for most buildings.
On top of that, the parachute system for the war zone—I almost called it 3.0. It's not; it's still war zone 2, but the Modern Warfare 3 update has a really generous parachute system; it's really quick to deploy; you get a lot of horizontal distance on it; and on top of that, the fall damage is quite forgiving, so you get a lot of zip lines.
There was a lot of new movement, a lot of mantling, not so much fall damage, and really rapid deployment of parachutes. And the overall combination here is that you move a lot faster, the map feels a lot more fluid, and you can zip around a little bit. It's not particularly realistic. it's arcadey, but I do enjoy it.
I also like that you don't need to put on overkill in your classes to equip a primary and a secondary previously, at least in, you know, old verdance. You would have to have the overkill perks, so everybody would take their Overkill one first and not have ghost, but now I can have ghost and I can have my sniper rifle and my SMG and AR, so that's like a nice little quality of life change.
There are hundreds of those little quality-of-life changes we'll talk about in a little bit. The graphics in the game have all the standard bells and whistles of Call of Duty's new engine, including greater render distance. RTX, volumetric lighting, fog and water, and things like that, but the important part for the War Zone 2 Modern Warfare 3 season 1 update is that it has much better aesthetics, much better lighting, and much more color than War Zone 2 or the Az Map, which means the map is far more pleasing to look at and it is way easier to identify enemies instead of everybody being a dark corner.
McDougall One of the other nice things about the season 1 update is that War Zone added Nvidia DLS 3. Their GPU powers all of the cards I use in my house, but Nvidia GeForce RTX players can already accelerate frame rates with DLS. 2.0 basically, how this would work is that it would use AI to super-sample your image to a higher quality so that the bass render could be lower, thus burdening the GPU less and giving you more frames.
Well, if you have a 40-series GPU, the DSSS3 feature does that, but it also interlaces additional frames so you can have dynamic scaling of resolution to lower the burden on your GPU, and you can dynamically generate new frames to really boost that kind of out of the Wazoo. What that means for me is that I maintain a very high frame rate pretty much no matter what I'm doing on the map, so I like to cap mine at 120 because that's a really nice interval for OBS to capture at, but I can crank it up to 200 or higher if I want to.
If you're curious about where to turn these features on your PC, just click on the settings wheel on the top right menu. Go to graphics, and in graphics, you're going to want to be on the quality tab. Now it'll probably default to display. You can see that I'm playing full screen. I do 120 FPS PS because that's what OBS likes, but in the quality tab, you can do graphic presets for your render resolution.
Dynamic scaling, but here we go upscaling and sharpening. I don't have Nvidia DLSS turned on; I have DAA, so we're going to swap to DLSS, which uses AI to basically enhance both your resolution and frame rate. I also turn on r-tracing, and then if you scroll down, you'll find the Nvidia reflex. Turning that on significantly reduces your input delay and is a godsend.
So the way this works is that it uses the Ada Loveless architecture. It takes previous frames, current frames, and some vector data directly from the game to generate new frames and pump them out crazy fast so you get that really high frame rate, kind of almost no matter what spec rig you're running on, and this is a lot more burden on the GPU because it's doing more things, so Nvidia added the reflex technology to decrease input delay.
Sometimes, when you do too many things, your input delay gets high, so they have Nvidia Reflex on to reduce the input delay again. This is only available on the 40 series GPU. All of the gameplay in this article is captured by Shadow Play. A lot of the streamers you see use filters. All of my PCs run article; I couldn't honestly be a better brand.
Advocate, but that's why I've got such a great frame rate. Let's go back to the rest of the review. More good things going on here are, again, like I said, the map is much better than Al Mazra; it's about 20% smaller, which you would think is a bad thing. But it's way more dense; there's a lot more buildings.
