Call Of Duty: WWII Supply Drops Are Purely Cosmetic, Sledgehammer Confirms

Call Of Duty: WWII developers took part in a short reddit AMA on Friday, and the team answered some pretty major questions. Sledgehammer’s finest revealed big changes to the Supply Drop system and even touched on multiplayer tickrates.

Taking cue from its various contemporaries like Overwatch and Battlefield 1, Call Of Duty’s controversial Supply Drop system will no longer dole out meaningful weapon variants like it has done in the past. Here’s what studio co-founder Michael Condrey had to say on the subject:

“All weapon variants and gear variants in Call of Duty: WWII Supply Drops are cosmetic only, so there are no stat-based variants in play. We’re also offering players Collections and Collection Bounties, giving a direct path for our community to earn items through all modes of MP and Headquarters play.”

In other words, unlike in past games, those who shell out the cash to purchase Supply Drops in WWII won’t have a fast track to the best guns on the roster. Last year’s Infinite Warfare was deemed exceptionally “pay-to-win” in this regard, so it’s nice to see 2017’s creative team taking a new approach with the franchise.

Also on the checklist of lackluster features from last year’s installment was Infinite Warfare’s below-average multiplayer tickrate. In non-technical terms, tickrates are a measure of how fast data can be sent between servers and clients at any given time. Faster rates mean less lag and fewer multiplayer mistakes. Infinite Warfare, for example, had a peak tickrate of 20 Hz when playing in a dedicated environment.

Keeping in stride with the competition, Call Of Duty: WWII is seemingly getting an update in that department. “We update packets 60 times per second when bandwidth allows,” Condrey said. That snippet suggests an average tickrate of 60 Hz for online play on dedicated servers, but it may not tell the whole story. Because that threshold is limited to “when bandwidth allows” it’s possible there may be dips below it in some circumstances. In general, however, the intent is to match the multiplayer performance of most current online titles.

Barring these two significant overhauls to the established status quo, the rest of the AMA was fairly standard. The team doubled down on its eSports commitment and said that Ranked Play and Game Battles are an “important” part of WWII’s formula. Between the new War mode, the Headquarters social space and the day-one map collection, November’s online offering was described as “the largest amount of content we’ve created for multiplayer at launch.”

Call Of Duty: WWII comes to PS4, Xbox One and PC Nov. 3. We expect the next major update on the game to take place during San Diego Comic-Con, which starts July 20. Details about the game’s co-op Zombies mode are reportedly coming “sooner than you think.”

What do you think about Supply Drops becoming a purely cosmetic system? Will online multiplayer be improved in WWII? Tell us in the comments section!