The return of the OG map, Verdansk, to Call of Duty: Warzone, has reinvigorated the ailing battle royale. Of that there’s no question, with folks jumping back into it after an absence, and, it seems, many of the existing players enjoying themselves a lot more.
Verdansk wasn’t just drop an old map and fill everyone with nostalgia, though. It brought with it a new “casual” battle royale mode, where a small number of real players drop in with a ton of bot players.
The idea being that casual mode is for the casual players. Those who want to experience a bit of Warzone, perhaps level up their weapons, practice a little, without feeling like they have to no-life the game. I get it. Warzone is one of the sweatiest games on earth.
Now, in an interview with IGN, the dev team behind Warzone has outlined how they’re keeping a close eye on casual mode, ensuring it doesn’t become tainted by these “sweats” leaking over from the main modes.
“The whole spirit of the Casual mode was to give people that were scared about getting into a time commitment or a game commitment or a skill commitment with Warzone, but do it on their terms. The nice thing about this is, this is the first rev of it. It just went live, and we’re going to look at the data, we’re going to evolve it over time to make sure it retains the design principles and spirit that we wanted it to have. So if we see sweats come in there wrecking the whole server, then we will have to come up with plans against that. It’s still pretty new right now.”
I am 10000% behind this. Casual mode is a breath of fresh air, and I’m extremely happy it exists. For one, it’s been a great place to complete the Return to Verdansk event and unlock the rewards without having to sweat through your eyeballs. Bots shoot back, but not like real players.
That said, I have seen some extremely high level players in there, and they certainly weren’t just running around opening safes. It hasn’t been too bad, at least from what I’ve seen (and they can’t have been that good if I managed to despatch them), but it’s reassuring to know that the developers are watching the behavior of players.
On one hand, yes, the sweatier players may want to use casual mode to easier level up new weapons or complete events. I think that’s still fair, after all, bot kills still count towards weapon XP.
My worry is that a lot of these players consider themselves “content creators” and will start using casual mode simply to generate high kill counts and generate social media clips.
For the casual player, this behavior doesn’t help them enjoy the game any more. And for the sweats who think that casual players don’t deserve a friendly place to play, just stop talking.
Call of Duty is a game for everyone. If you can’t go to work all day, load up a game you enjoy, and have a good time, then the game is broken, not the casual player. Not everything has to be an uber competitive experience. You’ll soon have ranked play for that.
So I’m happy they’ve said this. Casual mode is a breath of fresh air, and long may it continue.
