By After quite a lot of hint-dropping, trailing, teasing and Reddit rumouring, Call of Duty: Warzone has launched at last.
Look, it's understandable if you're a little underwhelmed. We've had 16 other Call of Duty games in the last 17 years, and yes, the last few have been pretty indistinguishable to anyone who doesn't spend six hours a day getting pinged in the back of the head by the SAS digital corps. But look at this trailer and tell us it's the same game it's always been.
Blimey. It's a BONK and a THWACK away from a Tarantino-directed episode of Wacky Races. Win a dogfight in the sky then swoop down to kick your adversaries off buildings! Kneecap someone then get run over by a truck! Pull a Raiders of the Lost Ark and boot someone else into a plane propellor!
Pell-mell mayhem with a minimum of the well-grooved pre-prepped tactics common to many first-person shooters' online worlds is clearly the order of the day, as Warzone promises to have 150 players put in teams of three darting around a gigantic map murdering other players, banking up in-game cash and doing mini-missions while avoiding being chopped up by helicopter rotor blades.
Hang on: a free-to-play online multiplayer co-op battle royale? Sounds very, very familiar, and a far cry from Call of Duty's usual, distinctly khaki-coloured, tone. It sounds, basically, like an attempt to steal Fortnite's trousers, but the fact those trousers are slipping onto one of the biggest juggernauts in gaming makes this an intriguing moment. It's the first time that an existing franchise has openly tried to siphon off some of the energy that Fortnite and Battlegrounds generate.
As successful as the Call of Duty series obviously is, it's in danger of becoming a legacy title with a devoted fanbase but next to no clout outside of gaming circles. With Warzone being free to play, it's trying to reassert itself in that nexus of pop culture that basically demands you have an opinion on it.
Back in the mid-noughties, Call of Duty was a definitive experience for younger gamers; now, its players tend to skew slightly older. Younger gamers are all over Fortnite, Minecraft and PUBG still, and Fortnite's success is at least in part down to it being free to play, as well as its friendly, rounded character designs, endlessly customisable skins and array of daft dances. It's a deliberate counterpoint to the anonymous black ops clones of the later Call of Duty titles, which suddenly feel very grungy by comparison.
Fortnite quickly became a phenomenon. One example: back in 2018, Dele Alli and Jesse Lingard were among a slew of sportsmen who celebrated goals with Fortnite dances. The closest a first-person shooter got to that kind of cultural cut-through was when Rio Ferdinand pretended to fire a rocket launcher into the crowd after scoring for Manchester United against Boro in 2006. It's been quite a while.
While Call of Duty was at the vanguard of the explosion in first-person online shooters, and for a decade managed to remain the go-to when your mates were over. It's unlikely to have the kind of generation-unifying ubiquity that Fortnite managed, but that's perhaps not the aim here – instead, it's a warning shot at rivals that says Call of Duty isn't ready to die yet.
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