'Call Of Duty: Warzone' New Update Reduces Max Players Per Game

Recently, every Call of Duty fan out there has been quite preoccupied with Modern Warfare 2 news (we have an actual, official release date for that now, by the way), so much so that it’d be quite easy for regular ol’ Warzone news to pass us all by. 

However, CoD’s battle royale just got hit with a pretty massive change. The Season Three Reloaded update just dropped yesterday, and with it, so have player counts. Forcibly, that is. That’s right - the amount of people playing in each match has just taken a significant hit, making for a pretty radical alteration.

Before we get into it, be sure to take a look at some of the funniest Warzone wins and fails right here.

As reported by Game Rant, Warzone has always had a higher player count than most battle royales, with 150 as a general (as opposed to PUBG’s 100, for example), and even 200 in some limited-time events. Now though, in Caldera battle royale modes, things are being turned down a notch - 120 is set to become the new standard (at least for now).

“With the addition of new second-chance mechanics, we are very conscious of making sure the mid-game doesn’t feel unfairly claustrophobic compared to the current Battle Royale pacing. We will therefore be trialing a slightly reduced Player count across all core Battle Royale squad sizes,” Raven Software wrote in the update’s patch notes. “We will be carefully reviewing sentiment and data to make sure that the engagement pacing remains more or less in line with the current experience and that Players can still pursue new personal records.”

As for those “new second-chance mechanics” in question, as Game Rant write, players are going to find themselves dying a whole lot less, and instead returning to play via the Gulag, self-revives, redeployment and buybacks. This, in theory, means that people are going to be spending a lot more time out on the map before being taken out, so it makes sense to limit how many are playing in the first place. We’ll have to see how this actually works in practice, though (as the devs will be, too).