Warzone is an amazing game and I suppose the best Battle Royale on the market at the moment. But like many other games-services, this game has a bunch of gaps in understanding of how players behave and what they need.
The goal of this article is not to critique Warzone, but to highlight what might be improved in the future, hopefully by the development team as it updates the interface like Player’s progression in the Lobby or after the battle progression screen. So I hope this article will be helpful.
Part 1. Check my gun
First I would like to talk about the most important thing in the whole game. The guns! For me as a player who was screaming so many times “How could you shoot me so fast?” it’s quite important to understand which gun is faster or more powerful. So in the Weapons tab designers gave you two areas where we can check out weapon characteristics, or even compare your customized setups. You can do it either in Edit Loadouts or Armory
Why there are two different places for the same action? Good question, we’ll discuss it later as it’s not the only one issue.
Problem 1. Charts are not informative. They look nice but they are almost useless. It’s really hard to know how much one attachment affects accuracy in comparison with another one. Try to compare how the fire rate for an M13 is better than for the G36 on the image below.
Not an easy task, right? You might say that the image is too small. Well, that is very similar to what you see while playing on a console with a TV.
The solution is — just add points amount for each bar. Even if the bar will change for 1 point, it will be easy to notice.
Problem 2. You can compare only guns of the same type. That looks fair at first sight but when you start digging deeper you realize that there are LMGs that shoot like assault rifles, assault rifles that shoot like SMG, and SMGs that are very similar to an assault rifle.
Gun customization breaks the borders meanwhile interface wants to prove that these borders are unbreakable.
Problem 3. Comparison is a long annoying process and unobvious as well. Just check how many steps are inside it:
- Go to Edit Loadouts
- Set your first setup
- Save it as a blueprint
- Name the blueprint (that is especially annoying on gamepad)
- Do the same with the second setup
- Go back to the Weapons tab
- Go to Armory
- Find your newly created blueprints (suddenly they are located in the middle of the list)
- And finally — compare them (I suggest to put a ruler on the screen to see the changes in the characteristics bars 😜 )
Understanding characteristics is very important for hardcore games and yes, core gamers will make a lot of tricks and twists to get the necessary information. Just check how crazy some people might go when trying to compare the effectiveness of different setups:
But do the players need to struggle so much or we already live in a world where user requirements are noticed?
Part 2. Blue Gun Print
Until season 4, blueprints were hidden and a lot of people simply did not know that such a thing exists (4 from 5 interviewed warzone players could not explain what blueprints are used for). Starting from season 4 players can notice blueprints in a more efficient way. Moreover, the game highlights that you can buy some blueprints for this gun even without going to the Store page. That is definitely a good improvement and together with the in-game popularisation of blueprints gives an impact on the meta.
Problem 3. Low attraction. The Armory is located at the bottom of the list. So if we expect that the list to be sorted by importance, then it’s even less important than Watch select which literally gives you the ability to select watches for your operator.
Problem 4. Unclear what blueprints are already yours and which are not. On the armory page you can find 3 different types of blueprints:
- your blueprint
- your custom blueprint
- blueprint in the store
And they are mixed all together. Perhaps the idea of the Armory was also motivating players to buy bundles by showing them beautiful customized guns, so scrolling their own blueprints they’ll notice another one and could be tempted to get it. That looks pretty smart but in reality, gives you nothing just pain.
And the reason for that is the bad visual distinction. Try to guess what card of a blueprint is related to which type
It’s like trying to distinguish members of the Blue Man Group — possible but very hard.
If you are a console player and seat far from the TV, then the cards look like this. It’s really hard to notice any details inside them without straining your eyes.
Grouping different types of blueprints in one list, small size of the cards, lot’s of visual ‘decorative’ noise and low amount of visual contrast makes navigation through armory very painful.
To determine the type of card they use different colors of the background, which is a problem for colorblind people and custom icons that are hard to recognize because of the small size and complicated metaphor. Also in other features of the game, these icons have different explanations.
Problem 5. I see blueprints but don’t know what to do. Remember I said that it’s a smart idea to promote bundles via Armory? Yes, if you like the blueprint you can press (X) and be immediately redirected to the shop. But some of the blueprints are free. Can you select one of your’s blueprints, press (X), and set this blueprint as a default gun for one of your loadouts. Nope! Instead, you need to:
- Look at the pic of the gun in Armory
- Figure out what type of gun it might be. The name of the gun is shown nowhere and some blueprints customize the layout of the weapon so much, that it’s almost impossible to guess what it is.
- Go back to the Weapons
- Open Loadouts
- Edit one of them
- Select type of the gun (SMG, Assault rifle, LMG, etc.)
- Scroll the list to check which of them have a blueprint icon (most of them have)
- Open each blueprint
- Finally find one you’ve been looking for
- Set as one of the Loadouts
Very user-friendly…
The same problem is faced during the fight when you grab some awesome looking gun and spend 10 mins with your teammates trying to figure out what the gun it is.
Part 3. The others
In this part, there is a mix of different UX issues around the whole lobby.
Problem 6. Data science. It’s really hard to find stats about the last battle. Instead of a foreword, I’ll just leave this screenshot…
The after Battle report does exist, but you need to be an expert of ‘Where’s Wally’ to find it!
The problem is that designers put it as one of the hints of a ‘How to navigate’ block. which is ignored after ~1 hour of gameplay when you understand how navigation works. Both location, size of the control, and type of information located nearby make it hard to notice.
One detail about this control that you should know — it is shown temporary and only after Battle Royale fights. That means if you are playing Plunder or any other game type (CoD periodically adds new events into the list) you will not see this control. That means you’ll pay even less attention if you play other types of game a lot.
When designers had similar problems with XP tokens, they solved it almost properly.
But the contrast of the tokens block is still not good enough. Especially in comparison with the News banner located nearby.
Temporary information blocks should have good contrast and be out of current grid in order to highlight their fickle state
Finally, you’ve reached the Match Summary page. Let’s think of what kind of players will be interested in this page. I may assume the main audience of this page is ‘stats lovers’ who really like to track their core KPI during the fight and compare them with other player’s stats. For such kinds of players, this page might be even more rewarding than meta, but what do we see on the page? A few data and a lot of meta. Thanks for that! Do you really think that meta is everything players are thinking about?
And about data — this data gives you no info on how good or bad you are until you enter this screen multiple times and remember your previous numbers. To be fair there is a small animation of increasing numbers, but if you’ve missed it — it’s your problem.
As the first page is almost useless you switch to the last one and finally, you can get some data to see how good or bad you are in comparison with other players.
Problem 7. Bad lock metaphor. Recent unlock and next unlock looks absolutely the same if you haven’t bought a battle pass. But the difference between them is that a recent reward can be received at any moment when you decide to purchase a battle pass, but meanwhile, the next one requires XP progression.
Problem 8. Different actions are assigned to the same button. Looks more like a bug, And the question to you — what will happen if you’ll press the square button?
Problem 9. Care about misclicks. You might already have noticed, working with loadouts is not as easy as you’d expect. That’s why a lot of lazy players like me keep it simple and don’t save them as blueprints… At least until all the attachments are unlocked.
You might probably pump up two guns in parallel so the Overkill perk is what you need.
So, let’s imagine you’re upgrading two guns and periodically change their attachments meanwhile. At some point, you might try a new perk and by mistake have changed perk 2. Oooops… Your second gun’s set up no longer exists. Now you need to set it again and try to remember what attachments you’ve been using.
The most simple solution is to save a temporary setup and if you (during this session) set perk 2 as Overkill to return your second gun with it’s preset. Easy, cheap and elegant solution without extra interface work.
Problem 10. Store branding is much larger than items in a bundle. I believe that the priority of branding in the store is overrated. If there is a huge amount of bundles, players will probably quickly 'scan' the page to avoid being overwhelmed by large amounts of information they don’t think is useful. So, there is a high risk that they will not pay attention to this bundle because:
- It's hard to notice if there are more than 5 items in the bundle so there is no feeling that one bundle is bigger than another
- The item's cards are pretty small so if it's hard to see what's inside, then I'll probably skip them
- The branded image is huge but not informative
I believe that a vertical list of bundles would work better. It would make navigation easier (only up and down instead of up, down, left, right), and having 5 horizontal blocks of information (header, navigation, branding, bundles list, and footer) makes the whole interface bad structured.
Problem 11. Bad action feedback. Several times when I started a trial I had a feeling it wasn’t working. The reason is that it requires some time to load. And there is no problem to wait a few seconds. The problem is that the screen seems to be frozen.
The reason for that is that loading animation is too tiny to notice and also is too far from the button.
System feedback should be located in the same zone, where a player makes an action or maybe better to draw his attention with the help of transition animation.
Unfortunately, designers forgot about tunnel vision, which is especially true for the big screen sizes.
Problem 12. Where am I? The navigation menu is definitely a key element in the lobby. I believe it’s a starting point for players to investigate and explore. But because of pretty aggressive ads of the season, you’d probably see it first rather than the pointer of an active tab. Navigation is messy and it’s easier to find the required page by scrolling all of them rather than finding an active tab in the list and defining in what direction you need to move.
Problem 13. Useless warnings. When you finally finish your trial there is a warning pop-us asking if you are sure to leave this training? Well, you simply have no other options then why are they asking?
It’s great that they’re asking this question when you are going to leave after the first try because you might lose 2 additional tries. But when there is nothing to lose, then what is the sense to ask?
Phew, that was a long trip so thank you for your time, and let me know what do you think about this article 😉
