The basis of this text is that while there are almost infinite hours of potential play available, there isn’t much you can do in COD: Warzone as far as variety of actions.

Contracts

Let’s start with contracts because it’s one of the driving forces of the game.

Contracts allow players to gain money by completing objectives. It also inadvertently pushes adversarial players into the same areas when contracts begin to deplete and sometimes betrays the position of enemy teams when contracts disappear from the map.

There are a limited number of objectives: Bounty, Most Wanted, Search and Destroy, Hostage Rescue, Hunt Enemy Squad, Deliver Cargo, Weapons Raid

While that sounds like a lot of different objectives, Bounty and Hunt Enemy squad can be needled down to finding a target and killing it; Most wanted turns into the same from the perspective of the hunted.

Search and Destroy, Hostage Rescue, and Weapons raid are essentially broken down into: Arrive at the target location; Kill the enemies there; Interact with whatever the objective is.

Delivering cargo is simply picking up a vehicle and moving it to another part of the map. An attack helicopter will attack the group but it doesn’t do enough damage to kill the squad and has just enough health to make sure the squad stays busy until arriving at the destination.

This action simplified:

Get to objective zone, complete objective

Killing

Bots

Obviously one of the biggest actions that players can take in a war game is killing. Enemy players and bots can be killed in Warzone 2.0. The addition of bots makes the pacing of the game a lot faster and rids the player of boredom while going from contract to contract.

Bots are broken down into varied enemy types:

There are ground infantry which have their own internal divisions based on weapon types and health. There are heavily armored infantry as well as juggernauts which varies the base bot slightly. The armored bots have helmets which, when shot, fly off and give the player indication that another head shot is available and would kill the enemy.

There are different vehicles in the game including aircraft and ground vehicles, mainly trucks. Some helicopters only transport troops into the field: Both deposit methods allow the player to target the infantry being offloaded while they’re in a vulnerable/exposed position. The other aircraft is an attack helicopter which bursts accurate machine gun fire and inaccurate rocket pod strafes at one player at a time. The trucks simply transport infantry and generally stop when engaged, even from a distance.

Humans

The most interesting aspect of the killing section is engaging with other human players as one will face an immediately indeterminable force. Even with advanced warning through UAVs or other detection technology provided to the player, one never knows how many enemies he’s up against because, say one is fighting a group of six hostiles, all six can be part of one squad or it could be two teams of three or any variation thereof. What’s more, human players generally have different styles of engagement and while many use long range weaponry to engage targets, some flank and close the distance as quickly as possible.

The killing action can be simplified to:

Aim mouse cursor at enemies, click left mouse button until the enemy is dead

There is a sub-action required for the killing action which is staying alive as dead players cannot kill:

In the event that the enemy damages you: get out of harm’s way and “heal” (wait for health to regenerate, put in armor plates if available)

Extraction from the game

In Warzone, regardless of whether one is playing DMZ or true Battle Royale, there is a battle royale element to the game: All players are fighting and being whittled into limited sections of the game. In the traditional Battle Royale, it’s a free for all amongst teams to be the last team standing. One fights against both the other teams and against the death zone that squeezes all players into one area of the map. The guiding of players from a large map into a small one makes the game exciting and forces the action.

In DMZ, players don’t have to do anything except extract to get a green win screen. However, there are three starting extraction zones which become fewer as time passes and this allows for a microcosm of the Battle Royale effect described above and for ambushes of the extraction sites: Both resulting in players being funneled into smaller maps where more action is almost sure to ensue.

This action can be simplified to:

Battle Royale => Move to “safe” zone, Kill the last enemy.

DMZ => Arrive at exfil site, Get in helicopter, Survive helicopter ride out.

Customization

Guns (Gunsmith)

If the game were simply the previously outlined actions, it would still have plenty of play value. However, the game includes progression of, principally, a player’s weapons and, secondarily, the player’s operator and “callsign”.

The gun progression allows for players to customize their weapons from the amount of ammunition carried in the receiver to the type of ammo to the receiver platform being able to be swapped out entirely. That is, a base 5.56x45mm M4 receiver can be swapped with say a .300 blackout receiver. Sights, barrels, barrel attachments (at the aperture, under the barrel, and around the barrel [lasers/lights]), stocks and combs, grips are some of the many customizations that can be made to, in players’ hopes, upgrade the weapon.

This action can be simplified to:

Base Customization System => XP to level, Level to unlock/upgrade.

Weapon => Create weapon, create modifiable parts.

I’ve written a good bit of text for each of the sections of the game and haven’t covered every single section of the game but one can see that there are a few actions that the player can take part in but these actions result in a significant investment of gameplay time.