Warzone Season 2 is the beginning of a "new chapter" for ranked play, with a focus on Resurgence and a brand new mode

While I’ve played a fair amount of Call of Duty Warzone in my time, I’ve never really felt compelled to get stuck into its ranked experience. I’ve dabbled in ranked Apex Legends and Fortnite in the past, but Warzone took so long to establish its competitive scene that I really never cared for it. However, I could be tempted by some of the changes coming to Warzone Season 2, which Raven Software says mark a “new chapter” for the battle royale game.

The big difference in Warzone Season 2 is that the traditional, large-map ranked mode will be replaced with something called Iron Gauntlet. Launching in a “beta” form, this mode introduces “tuned features such as health, loot, and loadout rules.” If the name sounds familiar, that’s because it’s being dubbed as an “evolution” of Iron Trials, the limited-time mode that pre-dated Warzone’s actual ranked experience, which arrived close to three years after it launched (a fact I still find baffling to this day).

“Iron Gauntlet represents an important step forward in refining competition for traditional Battle Royale, as well as an opportunity for us to experiment with a fresh mode with the long-term health of competition in Warzone in mind,” Raven says in an announcement post. “Throughout Season 2, we’ll be closely monitoring player feedback and in-game data to help determine how we mold this mode and the role it will play in future seasons.”

However, Iron Gauntlet won’t be a permanent fixture – it will rotate in and out of the game alongside Ranked Resurgence, which will return “early in Season 2.” Haven’s Hollow will be the Resurgence map of choice for the upcoming season.

“Importantly, we’ll be rotating these modes at defined intervals rather than running multiple competitive modes in parallel,” Raven says. “Iron Gauntlet will be enabled during specific sprints that will be proactively communicated throughout the season. While Iron Gauntlet is active, Ranked Play: Resurgence will be temporarily disabled. This approach will bring the competitive community together in an ecosystem with healthier matchmaking, stronger competition in matches, and exciting moments for our competitive community to chase unique rewards, while also giving us clearer insight into how each format performs.”

While this might irk some competitive players who just want to lock in and grind Ranked Resurgence, I think this is a smart way to introduce Iron Gauntlet, which will ultimately dictate the long-term future of competitive Warzone on traditional, large maps.

To coincide with the return of Ranked Resurgence, Call of Duty’s esports division has also announced a new tournament circuit called Warzone Resurgence Series. Through a mixture of online qualifiers and three LAN tournaments throughout the Call of Duty League season, a prize pool of $1.2 million has been allocated to it, so there could be a big payday waiting for you if you’re a bit of a Warzone fiend.

While all these competitive changes to Warzone sound very interesting and could lure me back, the timing is a bit frustrating, as Season 2 will also see Ranked Play finally arrive in Black Ops 7, and that’s certainly more my bag. Why CoD insists on putting ranked in its games a quarter of the way through their annual life cycles still bemuses me, but hey ho – the wait is almost over. Warzone and Black Ops 7 Season 2 begins on Thursday, February 5.