A week after the release of Call of Duty: Warzone 2.0, details are finally starting to emerge about the biggest changes being brought to the free-to-play battle royale, although the basic structure of Warzone (circles, camps, by-stations) remains intact, Infinity Ward has tweaked every detail. Perhaps the most radical change concerns the way players get custom loadouts in the middle of a match.

Gone are the days of wandering into a buy station and shelling out $10,000 for a complete set of loadouts; in Warzone 2.0, only the primary weapon of a loadout can be purchased directly. The remaining perks, secondaries, and slow abilities can be acquired in two ways: by conquering Warzone's new AI-controlled map, Strongholds, or by capturing loadout crates that drop randomly on the map.

Strongholds seems to be the quicker and more reliable method: according to Activision's official Season 1 blog post (opens in new tab), the first team to clear the enemy-free Strongholds will receive a set of loadouts of their choosing and a high-ranking loot-housing The team will earn the key to the Black Site, a challenging AI facility that houses high-level loot. Subsequent teams can also earn loadouts by re-clearing the compound, but this requires defeating a "specific number of defenders (AI or player)" and does not come with a key to a fancy black site.

This is the first major change made to Warzone's meta-defining loadout system since its release in 2020, and could have a major impact on how future Battle Royale matches will turn out. In the current system, every team that makes it past the first 15 minutes of a match typically has a custom loadout; it is not known if the same will be true in Warzone 2.0.

Notably, you can throw cash at custom primary weapons (the blog states that this is the "main advantage" of the loadout). Most Warzone players I know appreciate the Ghost perk, which hides you from the constant threat of UAV scans. It is not certain that killstreaks will be as common in 2.0, but if the loadout changes mean fewer players running around with ghost perks, UAVs will certainly be even more prevalent than before.

For everything that will be implemented in Season 1, please read the full coverage article (opens in new tab). The one I'm most curious about is DMZ, Warzone's new extraction shooter mode, but Activision remains tight-lipped about it. Today's post describes it as an open-world mode where "players are free to complete faction-based missions, take on additional side-objectives, engage enemy operators and AI combatants, and fight to survive while searching for valuable items in order to escape."

Warzone 2.0 will be released on November 16 alongside the Season 1 update of Modern Warfare 2.