Respawn Zone Wars

[Victoria Steigerwald]

Isometimes question if I can call myself a fan of extraction shooters when I don't enjoy the most popular game in the genre: Escape From Tarkov. I bounced off the hardcore milsim after a few painful gear wipes at the hands of extraction campers. I've almost reinstalled it a dozen times in the years since, hopeful that I could get into it with the right mindset, but always stop short of pressing play.

That's why I'm eager to give Gray Zone Warfare, the latest tactical FPS pressed from the Tarkov mold that's oozing with buzz from EFT devotees, a real shot. If I'm gonna suck, at least I'll suck right alongside a bunch of other new players.

The other reason factions matter is that each one has a persistent base camp on the 42km x 42km island of Lamang, and players in your faction are automatically allies. I was surprised by how much the faction system eases the tension of playing solo. Even if my faction mates are ultimately playing for themselves, it's really nice to have strangers watching your back.

At least during this early launch period, the geographic divide between the factions creates these "safe" zones in the corners of the map where you can be fairly confident there are no real enemy players. In my first hour exploring a town outside camp, I only encountered friendly players and NPCs. The closer you get to the center or opposing corners of the map, the more likely you are to run into the other factions. It reminds me of the Horde/Alliance dynamic in World of Warcraft, except the PMCs of Gray Zone Warfare are fighting over loot caches with shiny guns and water bottles.

Factions make for such a friendlier introduction than the minute one beatdowns you get in Tarkov or Marauders. And Gray Zone's other standout feature, its persistent map, slightly softens the blow of losing your loot. When you die, you respawn in the same session back at your base camp. From there you can start fresh with a new loadout like you would in Tarkov, or you can head back to where you just beefed it and try to recover what you lost. If a player killed you, then they probably pocketed your best stuff. But if it was an NPC, it'll all still be there.

Easy corpse runs are the reason the few deaths I've had so far in Gray Zone haven't bothered me too much. The first time, I died as soon as I stepped out of the helicopter in some sort of freak accident. The second time, I had to go AFK just as an NPC found me and scored an easy kill. Both times, I was able to recover everything I lost, something you won't see in Tarkov without a group of helpful friends willing to be your corpse mule.

These smart, welcome adjustments to the Tarkov formula make Gray Zone stand out in an increasingly homogenous genre. I want to play more Gray Zone Warfare, which is way more than I can say about the games that inspired it, but that makes its glaring early access messiness all the more frustrating.

As day one Steam reviewers will tell you, it's nearly impossible to get Gray Zone running at a smooth, competitive shooter-friendly framerate without a very powerful PC. If you're in the vast majority of Steam users with several generations-old hardware, you'll have to settle for a choppy 30-40 fps average with frequent chugs in busy areas (and that's at a humble 1080p with DLSS on). It's a nice looking game, but nothing about it suggests that only the might of 30 and 40-series cards can render its glory.

There are also some early balancing problems players have noticed. Since the preview period, Madfinger has been tweaking how helicopters work to discourage players from camping landing zones looking for easy kills. In a change made for the early access launch, players now have five seconds of invulnerability to safely reach cover after disembarking from a heli. Seems like a good measure, though ultimately I think players deserve to know when they're dropping into a zone with nearby enemies.

So yes, this is early early access. What you can play today feels like the beginnings of a much larger game, but it's hard to recommend dropping $35 on it (or a lot more, if you want more inventory space) as is. You only need to read this list of planned features to see how far Gray Zone Warfare still has to go:

Morgan has been writing for PC Gamer since 2018, first as a freelancer and currently as a staff writer. He has also appeared on Polygon, Kotaku, Fanbyte, and PCGamesN. Before freelancing, he spent most of high school and all of college writing at small gaming sites that didn't pay him. He's very happy to have a real job now. Morgan is a beat writer following the latest and greatest shooters and the communities that play them. He also writes general news, reviews, features, the occasional guide, and bad jokes in Slack. Twist his arm, and he'll even write about a boring strategy game. Please don't, though."}), " -0-10/js/authorBio.js"); } else console.error('%c FTE ','background: #9306F9; color: #ffffff','no lazy slice hydration function available'); Morgan ParkSocial Links NavigationStaff WriterMorgan has been writing for PC Gamer since 2018, first as a freelancer and currently as a staff writer. He has also appeared on Polygon, Kotaku, Fanbyte, and PCGamesN. Before freelancing, he spent most of high school and all of college writing at small gaming sites that didn't pay him. He's very happy to have a real job now. Morgan is a beat writer following the latest and greatest shooters and the communities that play them. He also writes general news, reviews, features, the occasional guide, and bad jokes in Slack. Twist his arm, and he'll even write about a boring strategy game. Please don't, though.

Game Modes/War is a game mode in BATTLEGROUNDS, it's a death match type game mode that allows respawning. As soon as you jump into the game, the safe area (White Zone) will immediately be set; if you die you will be respawned at certain time intervals.

War, a game mode from ARMA 3 BR that has a deathmatch style where players kill each other for 30 minutes (if you die, you respawn back in with a parachute) and then at the end once the blue zone locks in, you can't respawn anymore. After the blue zone locks, it will end normally in a BR ending with the circles, bombing runs and air drops.

Product: Apex Legends

Platform:PC

Please specify your platform model. PC

AMD or Nvidia Model Number N/A

Enter RAM memory size in GB N/A

What is your gamertag/PSN ID/EA Account name? Midnight9746

Please provide your squad mates' gamertag/PSN ID/EA Account name if possible. N/A

Are you using any software with an overlay? No

Which Legend were you playing (if applicable)? N/A

Which Legends were your squad mates using (if applicable)? N/A

Where did the issue occur? In a match

Which part of the map or menu were you in? If you don't remember the exact name, please describe the area or what you were trying to do in the menu. N/A

What were you doing when the issue occurred? E.g. respawning a squad mate at a beacon, using an ability, a squad mate left the game. Read below

Did your squad mates also experience the issue? I don't know

How many matches had you played in a row before the issue occurred? N/A

When did this happen? (dd.mm.yy hh:mm) 07/11/2023

How often does the bug occur? Often (50% - 99%)

How severe is your issue? Major impacts to gameplay

What happens when the bug occurs? Read below

What should be happening instead? Read below

Steps: How can we find the bug ourselves? Read below

When looking at the kill feed from the last bug, I've also noticed that it mixed us up with another team. I could see that someone spotted an enemy, (who isn't my teammate), and one of the players has the same name color as the one who's currently in the sky, (because that one isn't my teammate either).

The pings only show up in the kill feed, I didn't hear any legend say any of the pings or mention downing a player, nor did I see the pings themselves on the map. (It appears to be the team that kills you, who's pings you see in the kill feed).

Edited 2: The bugs continue!

The game is starting to NOT spawn me in the ring with my teammates, it put me somewhere far from the current ring and I couldn't help my team AT ALL. It also gave us 4 lives instead of 3, I know that because when I died to the ring, my teammates then died, and it redeployed us, with them in the ring, and me out of the ring again, even though we were already on strike 2, it should of squad wiped us. It also showed us a brief moment of where a random team was, (most likely the one that killed the two randoms).

You can see that the strike out counter remained on 2, even after it respawned us, (after playing another match, it would seem that after the first death, the counter is sometimes set to show 2 strikes, even though it should only be one strike, hence why there's an "extra life", either way that's a bug):

Edited 3:

I watched Twitch for week 1 of this event and gotten one of the drops, (the "Bit by Bit" gun charm), next it was suppose to award me the "Collecting Wins" holospray, but instead, it gave me the other gun charm, (Arcade Zapper). Am I not going to get the holospray? I mainly watched this week's Twitch streamers for the holospray.

Edited 4: The gamemode keeps killing two people on my team, (myself and one other), after our first deaths, wasting our lives and preventing us from having any kind of fun. It happened 3 games in a row now.

Edited 5: Unsure if this is a bug, since if deathboxes count as entities, there would be too many overloading the server, but deathboxes are despawning in this mode, taking all the loot with them. This makes armor swaps and grabbing healing items and ammo no longer possible as the boxes tends to disappear right when you need them the most. Also noticed that when a Lifeline revives someone, sometimes a DOC drone would appear for a few moments even when Lifeline already threw down a tactical.

Edited 6: I got knocked out of a Valk skydive by the ring, and the ring was able to deal damage to me in this mode when it really shouldn't been able to at all.

Edited 7: Gamemode keeps randomly getting all blurred. At first I thought it was my eye sight, but I when I look at my second monitor, I see everything perfectly, so Apex is randomly losing quality when there's no settings enabled that would have it trade quality for performance.

No one tests the game, do they? If there are testers, they clearly don't report things that they should or the test server doesn't have the same problems, (or something). I suggest having people who purposely try to break the game test for bugs instead of whoever's been doing it, because those gamers would find these issues in no time. However, I found most of these bugs from the Post event within 3 hours just by playing the game normally. Which, being spawned far out of zone, (and for no reason too), or just instantly killed is my most hated bug I've ran into thus far.

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