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Warzone Season 2 Reloaded has put the game in a great place, but there are plenty of persisting issues that point to a need for Warzone 2. Warzone was unplayable for many players after the Call of Duty: Vanguard integration, the second major integration in less than a year. Several updates later, it appears to be less problematic in terms of server failures and graphic glitches, but there's still an abundance of small, irritating issues that point to a larger problem: Warzone is too big for its own good.
The devs know this, in fact they've admitted that they're not happy with the bloated state of Warzone. After all, it was initially built be an extension of 2019's Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, not a conduit through which all future COD games would be filtered. Warzone 2 will be built from the ground up in a brand-new engine, and while details are scarce, looking at the current state of Warzone may help us understand what the sequel will look like.
The bugs
Warzone Season 2 Reloaded sets a high bar for future updates
Even after several rounds of updates and patches, there are still a bevy of frustrating issues in Warzone that seem to come directly from shoehorning three games'-worth of content into a framework that wasn't meant to hold as much. I run into the most issues in the menus, which now contain weapons, operators, vehicles, calling cards, and more from games spanning over two years. The green square icons that delineate between new and old gear refuse to disappear no matter how meticulously I scroll through everything, for example, which makes it impossible to figure out what items are actually new and which are ones I've had for seasons. The "clear new indicators" button on PC doesn't work either – clicking it temporarily removes the square over the "weapons" section, but navigating away from that section sees it immediately pop back up. It feels like it's mocking me.
After buying a new Operator pack for Vanguard's Polina that includes a weapon skin, a charm, and a cool new finishing move, I'm perplexed when I discover the finishing move is somehow showing up under Bale, a Modern Warfare Operator. Any attempt to navigate to the actual finishing move results in my game freezing, and the first finishing move on the list of options is clearly just internal code accidentally posted in-game.
Discovering these oddities only happens when I can actually navigate through the menus, of course. While I can rotate through Operators, weapons, and challenges with relative ease on PC, the menus are insufferably laggy on my Xbox Series S. My Operator won't appear on the playlist selection menu, I can't thumb through my loadouts without the game stuttering and sputtering, and sometimes it'll downright crash if I move too quickly.
It's easy to imagine that most of these issues are due to the bloated state Warzone is in right now. That's why a Warzone sequel is so important – and so necessary.
The promise of a sequel
We don't have many details on the Warzone sequel (it's unclear if it'll be called Warzone 2 or something else entirely, or when it's due out) but we do know that it will be built from the ground up in a brand-new engine. The engine will likely be an iteration of the IW engine that has been powering most Call of Duty games since Modern Warfare 4. The latest IW engine, IW 8.0, was created by Infinity Ward's Polish studio for Modern Warfare and Warzone, so it's about time a new engine was rolled out. Interestingly enough, Black Ops Cold War does not use the IW engine, but uses a modified Black Ops 3 engine.
This is where the Warzone sequel can drastically differ from Warzone. We don't know yet if Activision intends to treat the sequel the same way it did Warzone and use it to thread together all future Call of Duty titles. If that is the plan, it's safe to assume the newest game engine will be built with scaling in mind, as that was the main issue that hamstrung Warzone itself: the team found the "upper limits" of the engine's tech and thus ran into "significant development challenges," according to a call attended by Charlie Intel. A new engine will hopefully be a scalable one, as integrating aspects from different games that use different engines is clearly no easy feat. And if Warzone 2 has no plans to tie together future Call of Duty titles, that isn't necessarily a bad thing – it should have the legs to stand on its own and still be wildly successful.
Activision is calling the Warzone sequel a "massive evolution of Battle Royale with all-new playspace and a new sandbox mode." That means we're getting a new map, and with it built in a new engine, a new map that hopefully doesn't have the same graphical issues Caldera faced at launch. A sandbox mode could make Warzone an even bigger threat to Fortnite, as it could let players build maps and create game modes that exist outside of Call of Duty's typical matchmaking parameters.
You can bet that Infinity Ward is taking everything it's learned from Warzone's biggest pain points and applying those changes to its next game. Integration issues, scaling problems, graphic glitches and more are most certainly in the front of dev's minds - they're certainly in the front of mine. And so while Warzone may still be frustratingly buggy, the existence of those very bugs will hopefully help carry the franchise forward and shore up the next game.
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