Warzone 2’s DMZ mode is a story-driven fight for survival

It’s finally here

At long last, Activision has revealed more information about Warzone 2’s mysterious DMZ Mode: the highly-anticipated new game type releasing on November 16.

DMZ mode turns Warzone from its battle royale free-for-all, where 100 players duke it out to be the lone survivors, into a more directed, objective-based game. You’ll fight human players, and AI, in a desperate rush to escape Warzone’s island.

More a companion piece than a spin-off necessarily, Warzone 2 holds many links to its mainline sibling Modern Warfare 2. As stated by Activision in the roadmap for the two games, DMZ is just one of many new features offered in the all-new iteration of the series’ battle royale playground.

Third person time’s the charm 

DMZ, according to the roadmap, “is an open-world, narrative-focused extraction mode where Operator squads have free rein to complete faction-based missions”. With AI enemies around every corner, side missions aplenty, and not much time to get them all done before your team’s extraction, DMZ taps the vein of some of the best survival games – especially the 2017 gem Escape from Tarkov, which combines elements of survival horror, action, and FPS goodness.

New to Warzone 2 will be the Third-Person Playlist, a series of missions that can only be played via the new third-person view rather than the typical FPS stylings of Call of Duty. This is supposedly going to facilitate “different visibility tactics and an altered, but still action-packed gameplay feel”. If you want to try it out early, you can use a third-person perspective in Modern Warfare 2 and get a hang of it before Warzone 2 lands.

One of the larger maps in Modern Warfare 2, Al Mizrah, will be also available in Warzone 2 to play with friends and frenemies alike, meaning you can get some serious practice in before the curtain falls later this month.

Same same, but different 

DMZ differentiates from the classic PvP offerings of battle royale games, but Warzone 2 itself should hold many similarities to its soon-to-be relaunched older sibling, Call of Duty: Warzone Caldera.

According to the roadmap, this will work by having the games exist as two separate experiences. 

As of November 28, Warzone will resurface as Warzone Caldera. Even though both Warzone games will center around the key battle royale objectives of completing contracts and wiping out enemy teams, they aren’t to be conflated at all.

Unlike Warzone Caldera being a standalone title, there will be an element of overlap between Modern Warfare 2 and Warzone 2. New seasons of content will now bring massive updates and changes to Warzone 2’s map, while the original Warzone will remain something of a time capsule.

By Jasmine Gould-Wilson