In a November 9 blog, as part of a stuffed first season,
Call of Duty announced that it was introducing a pliable battle pass system to both
Modern Warfare II and
Warzone 2.0, a huge deviation from
Call of Duty’s norm.
CoD battle passes
are often more direct, with battle pass tiers unlocking as you earn XP and progress normally through the game. But this latest battle pass doesn’t take a typical, linear, full-speed-ahead approach to
CoD’s selection of unlockable skins, weapons, and Weapon Blueprints. Instead, as the blog puts it, it “takes the form of a multi-Sector map.”
This means you can unlock elements of the pass in the order you prefer, intentionally choosing features that interest you instead of slogging through levels that don’t. It could be a refreshing break from
CoD’s familiar system.
“Each map has at least 20 Sectors with five items in each Sector — [earned Battle Token Tier Skips] can be used to either unlock adjacent Sectors or earn more items within an unlocked Sector,” the blog continued. “Essentially, these tokens can be used to unlock specific items within the Battle Pass at your own pace — whether it is a new free functional weapon or a cool new Operator Skin, you have control over what gets unlocked earlier on the road to 100% map completion.”
Outside of the battle pass, both games will get missions, maps, and more for their season one —
Warzone will receive an open-world DMZ mode and different maps, including one for
imagined capital city Al Mazrah, among other things, and
MWII will also gain maps, including a “reimagined” version of
Modern Warfare’s
multiplayer Shoot House, fresh weapons, and playable characters.
The
CoD team said that players would get an even more detailed explanation of the battle pass next week, presumably after
MWII’s and
Warzone 2.0’s first season releases on November 16.
Until then, here’s are some additional highlights of
MWII’s season one, both within and outside of the battle pass:
- Four new weapons. Two of them, the Victus XMR Sniper Rifle and Bruen Ops Platform, are free with the battle pass.
- Six new Operators, or playable characters. One of them, Nigerian counterterrorism group leader Zeus, unlocks automatically when you buy season one’s battle pass.
- Surreally, football (the soccer kind) is also coming to MWII. Neymar Jr., Paul Pogba, and Leo Messi characters will roll out in bundles on November 21, November 25, and November 29 respectively. There will also apparently be a “limited-time CODBall mode.”
- Hitting Rank 56 “will allow you to earn a persistent Prestige Rank across all seasons, rather than having it reset at the end of each season,” the blog said. After unlocking Prestige 1 with Rank 56, you will be able to go through four more ranks at your own pace.
The post Modern Warfare II Reveals A Game-Changing, Non-Linear Battle Pass appeared first on Kotaku Australia.