I’m not really a Call of Duty player for the most part. Sure, I’ve played the hits like anyone who enjoys a good shooter, and have fond memories of the first, second, and third, plus the Modern Warfare games and the original Black Ops, but besides those, modern CoD has mostly alienated me. Or at least it did until 2022 when I found myself putting hundreds of hours into a new Warzone mode: DMZ.
To this day, I genuinely think DMZ is one of the most underrated extraction shooters around, plus one of the best things modern Call of Duty has ever produced. It’s not necessarily for the hardcore crowd, but for those who prefer more PvE-centric play. Back before DMZ, I felt alienated by the genre. I personally love extraction shooters like Hunt: Showdown—it’s a fantastic concept, but for me its world and setting (which I wanted to explore) were hampered by the fact I’d get sniped whenever I attempted to do that.
Sean Martin
DMZ was a great extraction shooter, and the fact that I, someone who doesn’t really play modern Call of Duty, am willing to die on this hill, tells you a lot about how bloody good it was. It won’t exactly scratch the hardcore PvP itch for Tarkovites and Hunt Showdowners, but for those who love a PvE-centric experience with a dash of PvP, it was a grand ol’ time.
I love PvP, but more as an interlude, as a tasty little morsel of encounter that occurs between exploration and PvE. And this is one of the reasons DMZ was so good. The giant city-wide map of Al Mazrah, flush with locked buildings to explore, loot rooms to raid, vehicles, events, and even boss-type enemies felt so liberating. Sometimes you’d encounter other players, sometimes you wouldn’t, but when you did, its team-based mechanics made these encounters all the better.
Not just proximity chat, but the ability to gamble on betraying your team to join another, or even recruit other teams you’d just wiped, giving you a better chance at clearing harder areas. And to clarify, I’m not talking about an unofficial alliance Marathon-style, you could literally join other teams to tackle harder content. Stuff like the Koschei Complex—an entire indoor mode with loot vaults and bosses you could only matchmake for in Al Mazrah itself.
Building 21 was a fantastic concept, too, channeling many of the same ideas as Marathon’s Cryo Archive years before. To enter this hardcore mode, you required a special keycard loot item you could only find in Al Mazrah, which would give you a single run when the mode was periodically active. This was a great way to incentivise players to bring their best gear, especially as the building was filled with puzzles, dangerous enemies, valuable loot, and bosses like the grenade launcher-wielding Velikan.
Defeating him was the only way to get this extremely powerful gun in DMZ and my proudest moment in the mode might be when I managed to kill him and snatch it. All of this is to say, DMZ was filled with really smart ideas, and for me, it was my Arc Raiders before Arc Raiders.
Sure, it wasn’t perfect, and sometimes a match would devolve into teams of six riding around ganking everyone in sight. DMZ has also progressively gotten more sweaty since its release (as shooters generally do), but especially after Activision stopped supporting the mode in 2023. That’s why I’m excited for a fresh start. As you’ve probably seen, DMZ 2.0 is set to arrive with Modern Warfare 4, and not as a beta like the previous iteration, but a fully-fledged mode.
Watch On
You can watch the reveal trailer above, plus a developer deep dive on the COD Podcast where they discuss DMZ 2.0’s development, but it sounds pretty great. There’s a new stealth system, dynamic weather, the option to bring vehicles into the mode, but the biggest green flag for me is that they’re talking about accessibility and accommodating all the different player experiences they observed in the original DMZ.
There are also new deployment options that allow you to matchmake with people who want to do similar stuff, avoiding that classic DMZ experience of one player running off in a completely different direction. The story missions also sound much cooler. No more picking up three bandages and exfiling—one of the missions they describe involves robbing a casino vault.
Perhaps my favorite addition is the “star system”, an almost GTA-style escalation as you’re discovered and continue to loudly kill enemies. The higher your stars, the more enemies will be drawn to you, including “deathstalkers” and “hunt squads” neither of which sound particularly friendly. In general, though, it sounds like DMZ 2.0 will be much more reactive towards your team’s playstyle.
When I first watched the trailer, I was a little nervous that Infinity Ward was pushing the experience purely towards PvP, but from what I’ve read and what’s been said by the developer, it genuinely seems like it’s building on what makes the original DMZ such a fantastic extraction shooter. Essentially upgrading every part of the experience as it becomes a fully-fledged mode versus its beta predecessor.
Either way, if you’re an Arc Raiders player who loves its PvE-focused elements, but maybe want to try your hand at a little more PvP, I think DMZ 2.0 is set to be pretty special. Especially if it manages to retain DNA of the original when it releases in October.
Read the full article here
