Warzone 2 loadouts are now officially half-price, with the latest Call of Duty update making personalised primary weapons available for $2,500 CoD dollars rather than $5,000. This, combined with the broader Modern Warfare 2 season one changes, which introduce even more buy stations, means getting your own, crafted guns is now a lot easier in the battle royale game. But does this help or hinder the new Call of Duty experience?
We all want the best Warzone 2 SMGs, and the latest updates from Infinity Ward, Raven Software, and Activision make that much easier. The Warzone 2 map is now littered with twice the average number of buy stations per game, and, as of December 19, buying personalised primary weapon loadouts costs exactly half of what it used to.
On the one hand, great, the best Warzone 2 Lachmann 556 loadout is now easier to snag than ever. If you’ve spent hours in Al Mazrah, DMZ mode, and Modern Warfare 2 multiplayer grinding for attachments, you can take your customised lead slinger out into the battle royale a lot more often.
At the individual level, it gives the game more personality, and further incentive to keep playing – you and your squad can synchronise what weapons you’re all grinding for, with perhaps one player building towards a great RAAL MG, while another kills their way towards an improved Kastov 74u, and when you play Warzone 2, you can feel more like it’s your game, played your way.
It also feels more just. If you’ve committed hour after hour building the best Warzone 2 guns, it seems only right that you should get to use them more often. Warzone 2 is a competitive game that’s supposed to reward hard work.
If you’re buying into the experience, making Call of Duty your central go-to whenever you flip on the PC, I’d argue that kind of devotion and loyalty deserves to be reciprocated. You put in the time. At some level, you should get to reap the rewards. If buying primary loadouts is too expensive – and I’d argue, for a lot of players, $5,000 CoD bucks is prohibitively expensive, as you often die before you accrue that much cash – the drive to earn them disappears.
What I worry about, however, is a growing disparity between the Warzone 2 devout, and players, not unlike myself, who are unable to commit to the FPS game wholesale. It’s a clumsy metaphor, but I imagine the emergence of a kind of class system in Call of Duty, with those ‘privileged’ enough to have unlocked all the best loadouts at the top, and the rest of us, who for whatever reason still rely on the more basic weapons, struggling at the bottom.
Between work, responsibilities, other commitments, and playing other videogames, at most I will manage perhaps four or five hours of Warzone 2 per week. It won’t be long until a considerable percentage of the playerbase outstrips me and my more casual comrades in terms of guns and unlocks – in fact, it’s already started to happen. With loadouts now more readily available than ever, I worry about getting overpowered out of the game. What chance do I, with my diminutive level 9 M4, stand against someone with a fully customised M13B?
And yet, even as I write that, it feels unjustifiable. If people are playing more, they should be rewarded more, and the game should proportionately enable them to use those rewards. Perhaps the solution is some more-advanced version of skill-based matchmaking, whereby games of Warzone 2 are populated with players who all have a similar level of guns and custom loadouts.
Or perhaps unlocking the best weapons needs to be easier in general, so more players can build custom guns, and access them more easily – but again, that risks spoiling the kind of in-game ‘economy’, since it puts everyone on a similar keel, and removes the incentives for grinding and earning.
Ultimately, cheaper loadouts are an improvement. Even if you’ve unlocked only the very initial guns and attachments, having easier access to those still makes you more powerful, and I’d say more likely to enjoy the game, than being stuck with just the loot weapons you have to scrounge in Warzone 2.
It just depends on how quickly the — so to speak — class divide emerges in Warzone 2; how wide it becomes; and whether measures are implemented to try and mitigate the inevitable variance. Warzone 2 is a permanent work in progress. Hopefully the developers can maintain a fair society.
If you want to get your hands on a loadout, you’ll need to find the Warzone 2 strongholds and black sites. You’ll also need to know how to get Warzone 2 black site keys, to get in there, grab the best loot, and head to a buy station for your favourite shooter.