Warzone 2.0: The DMZ AI Difficulty Is Too Damn High

Whether you’re on the train that orbits the map or not, the AI exhibits a level of awareness of where you are and the capacity to shoot through walls that makes it almost impossible to respond. You can literally hide in a fully covered train car with no lines of sight, and bullets will start flying through the walls. I’ve stopped trying to loot the train entirely because of this. Combined with their ability to respawn so fast as to make clearing out a base feel completely worthless and the constant recurrence of AI floating in the air, it feels like playing against someone who’s running aimbots and other hacks.

When you consider the fact that dying in this game mode means you’ve lost all your gear, these kinds of crushing, unexplainable moments of near instadeath make it profoundly frustrating.

Sometimes it’s like you need to be able to shoot, reload, and replate all at once in order to even stand a chance, and this doesn’t just happen in the map’s most dangerous areas. Looting a seemingly irrelevant building will sometimes trigger waves of fully plated AI, with backup descending from unstoppable helicopters, that outpace and outnumber you to absurd degrees. It’s even worse now that armor-piercing ammo doesn’t, um, pierce armor anymore.

But the conversation deserves nuance because, for those who are enjoying the mode, a straight nerf across the board risks throwing off the genuine challenge that many, myself included, come to the game for. Right now, that balance is too heavily tipped in favor of the AI, who are difficult to a broken degree.

When you lose two-thirds of your armor the second you’re spotted, and you’ve unloaded countless amounts of ammo that break any claim of difficulty due to “realism,” it’s hard to rise to that challenge when you’re playing against forces who can infinitely out think and outmaneuver our soft, analog human brains.