Call Of Duty Spectator Mode Lets You Watch Warzone In Third-Person
Get ready to see the Call of Duty franchise from a whole different angle thanks to Warzone's new Spectator mode. Since the release of the OG Call of Duty all the way back in 2003, we've been locked into the idea of it being a first-person shooter. It's a tactic that has worked, and even though we've been through the trenches of both World Wars, the Cold War, and even a dystopian future, Call of Duty has become arguably the biggest first-person shooter franchise there is.
Despite Call of Duty's first-person stance meaning you get up close and personal with all the bloodshed and bullets, there have been calls for some games to add a third-person camera. Especially in the likes of multiplayer games like Call of Duty: Warzone, it seems a shame to waste all your hard-earned skins on simply staring down the barrel of a gun. Spectator mode fixes this with the long-awaited tweak of a third-person Call of Duty title.
How can you play Call of Duty: Warzone in third-person?
Posting on Reddit, u/Potatofrags noticed the introduction of Spectator mode. Here, you can zoom out and enjoy all the fun of the fracas from a third-person perspective. A perk/problem is the idea that you'd be able to follow your teammates and potentially alert them to incoming enemies sneaking up behind them thanks to a moveable camera angle. In response to the post, one disgruntled critic wrote, "That is going to be easily abused. You shouldn't be able to gain information just because a teammate is spectating in 3rd person". Another added, "Third person spectator is great, but it needs to be disabled for teammates. Because this is going to be abused so goddamn much".
Putting critiques to bed, it sounds like Spectator mode only lets you follow the action of the person that just downed you. As well as showing them running around Verdansk from behind, there's the ability to rotate the camera, so you can potentially see their own demise coming before they do - justice is best served piping hot!
Games like Fortnite have become known for showing off skins with third-person angles, while there's also the ability to watch matches/follow your team after you've been downed. Even though Warzone and Epic Games' battle royale behemoth are going for very different demographics, the pair continue to feed off each other's good ideas. Spectator mode hasn't officially been announced by Raven Software, so at the time of writing, no one's quite sure whether this is the real deal or just another one of those niggling Warzone bugs. Anticipating it's an actual feature, a frustrated player concluded, "Ahh yes, this will look good in my collection of completely useless things that activision added to warzone that instead of fixing the damn game."
Has there ever been a third-person Call of Duty game?
Unfortunately, Warzone can't claim the title of being the first third-person CoD game. As well Call of Duty: Strike Team for mobile in 2013, Sledgehammer Games had been working on a third-person game set in Vietnam. Speaking to Game Informer, studio founders Glen Schofield and Michael Condrey explained how the developer wanted to "shake up" the series by moving into third-person. Schofield confirmed around six to eight months of work were put into the project - which boasted some "cool mechanics".
The untitled game was going to take this unique perfective to the booby trap-filled jungles of Cambodia. Instead, the Sledgehammer team was pulled over to work on Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 and the idea was scrapped. "Let’s be frank, Infinity Ward was going through some transition," said Condrey. "We were growing with a triple-A team here, and the chance to work on the biggest game at that time and this fiction and space was super exciting for us. We would’ve loved to have made [the third-person Call of Duty]. It was in a space that we enjoyed, but how does anything compare to the first-person blockbuster release of 2011?”
These days, it's hard to imagine Call of Duty in anything other than first-person. It's all well and good to experience a break from the norm, but don't expect a fully-fledged and third-person CoD game to come out anytime soon.
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