Tips & Tricks: Call of Duty: Warzone

Gaming has been a hobby of mine for over 13 years and despite all the games that have come out there’s only one ‘twitchy shooter’ that satisfies the itch left behind by Modern Warfare 2. Call of Duty: Warzone and by extension Modern Warfare (the new one). With this game’s popularity comes a slough of new players looking to dig their teeth into the franchise for the first time so this multi-part series of tips is designed to help the fledgling ass-kicker win a few games.

When I first started playing Call of Duty: Warzone I had come from APEX Legends, The Hunt: Showdown, and Rainbow Six: Siege. If you’ve played any of these games you know first hand that they are very positioning oriented and raw aim doesn’t matter quite as much as map knowledge and predictive play.

While Call of Duty: Warzone definitely calls for those things, close combat and mid-ranged encounters are usually decided by the fastest and most precise reaction time which gives players, like myself, who aren’t naturally ‘twitchy’ a daunting learning curve.

Below we’re going to cover tips that I think will help everyone, but mostly people like myself who are transitioning from other games to this one.

Tip #1: Basic Movement Options

Movement is one of the most important aspects in most shooters because it is your main defense against bullets, seeing as skin doesn’t work too well. Here we’re going to talk about the various movement options you have available to you and what you can do to improve your gameplay by making small tweaks:

Walking/Crouch-Walking/Sprinting/Crawling are the main forms of locomotion in the game. There isn’t much to say about these options save this bit of advice: Standing and strafing while shooting is much more effective for fighting people at mid to long range while moving in semi-circles is better against close range targets.

Sliding is perhaps one of the most commonly used techniques in the game but often leads to death rather than safety. I argue that this is because most people fail to realize that they lose momentum at the end of their slide. If you simply remember that while sliding your recoil improves, your character model leans back, and you slow as you reach the end you’ll find yourself much harder to kill.

Jumping allows you to mantle many objects in the game which is the positioning element of Warzone. While running at most walls that are only slightly taller than your character model, angling your camera up towards ‘the corner’ of your screen, and jumping you will find that the world of Warzone is much more ‘Mirror’s Edge’ like than original expected.

Parachuting is fairly simple while your parachute is out landing cannot hurt you but while it is put away it can- but how far do we need to be from the ground before we can land safely without it?

When Falling from anywhere, air included, you must be less than 13m from the ground. The easiest way to see this is to ping the ground before you leap from something. Using the vertical movement of the game is much more disorienting to most players than simply strafing so try it out with your newfound bravery!

Vehicles are easily one of the most entertaining elements of Warzone. All vehicles can absorb a reasonable amount of damage and move you much faster consistently than you could on foot. The downside to these is that they appear on the mini-map in red while you’re moving in them, they make a ton of noise, and you can be shot out. The upside is that it is possible to put Trophy Systems, C4, and other neat treats on the ride to make it less enticing. Still, players will certainly try. The main thing to know about vehicles is that the Truck and the Van are the safest and you can hop out of a moving vehicle without taking damage (except the Helicopter which you need to parachute or fall properly to survive). The caveat to this is that you always exit the vehicle on the side your character is in, so remember that when choosing how to position your ride for a firefight.

That’s it for this entry in the guide! Please Follow and share my work if you enjoyed it and donate to my ko-fi if you can, the pandemic has hit us very hard as it has everyone and anything helps.