A bizarre mechanic in Call of Duty: Warzone makes fighting near the edge of the ring difficult to navigate due to the automatically equipped masks in the game – and players are asking for a fix.
If a player has a Gas Mask in their inventory, stepping outside of the closing zone will auto-equip the gear to protect them from the poisonous fumes. But this poses a problem that might not have been intended by the devs.
The masks are a unique component of Infinity Ward’s battle royale. Where other titles have a storm, a Modified Containment Ring, or something of that sort, Warzone lets players have a fighting chance against the outer barriers.
But to activate that, a player’s character model will have to reach up and bring the mask down onto the face – temporarily obscuring their vision.
While equipping the mask has a realistically short animation, the obstructed frames get problematic during a fight. Especially if the animation keeps repeating in quick succession.
A similar problem happened to Reddit user ‘iTz-Jazz5’ and a few others when they found themselves holding off multiple opponents while trying to stake their claim within the ring.
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In the typical rhythm for players fighting to get into the zone, they will attempt to etch forward to claim more ground but retreat slightly in case they overstepped.
Put people are finding that the dance gets heavily swayed to one side since retreating into the zone during the fight activates the Gas Mask’s animation.
“The mask mechanic needs changing,” iTz-Jazz5 said. “Just leave the mask on. Completely ruined me in this gunfight.”
Whether hugging the zone or just getting back from a long-distance rotation into it, the fight at the borderline can sometimes be determined by the mask’s animation.
“Yeah this sh*t has gotten me killed a few times as well,” user ‘Skivy’ said. “The mask should either stay on for the full duration, or you should be able to manually take it on/off.”
It could be that the Warzone devs intended for this to be another example of players with better positioning having a natural advantage, but if it isn’t then a fix could be worked before it affects more people.