Activision may be under new ownership at Xbox, but that’s not slowing down its flagship series. After a few years in development, Call of Duty Warzone Mobile is finally launching worldwide under the Microsoft banner. It’s a major moment for the shooter series that’s endured multiple industry changes over its long lineage. The new mobile game is the latest evolution for Call of Duty, bringing a high-quality battle royale experience to phones.
Related The road to Warzone Mobile Call of Duty Warzone Mobile is part of a wider shift for the Call of Duty brand that started to roll out in 2019. That was when Activision took the series to phones with the award-winning Call of Duty Mobile. Since then, the franchise has steadily grown into its own ecosystem. The launch of Call of Duty Warzone in 2020 would help unite console and PC players. To fully complete the circle, though, Activision would need to fully loop its mobile experience in.
Warzone Mobile looks to pay off that grand vision and that can be seen in a few of its interconnected features. For instance, players will see their Call of Duty friends in the mobile version on day one, and can even chat with players on other platforms. The mobile version would still require a bit of tweaking, with Plummer noting that console and mobile players have very different expectations when it comes to content cadence.
“We’re looking mostly at feedback from mobile players, but we also look across the franchise to see what’s hot,” Plummer says. “And you’ll see things all the time that we’re adapting based on that feedback. Modern Warfare 3 got a lot of praise for its movement system, and we’ve adapted a bunch of that into Warzone Mobile. Not everything is wholesale 1:1 because some things didn’t work as well on mobile, but that’s kind of the way to think about it.
Plummer doesn’t see that as a problem, noting that the game’s reliance on real players instead of bots makes it an entirely different beast. “This is really the first time has ever been experienced properly on mobile,” he says. With that accomplishment in mind, Plummer doesn’t see a need for Warzone to change its winning formula just yet.