Warzone has just been updated to version 4.17.0! This blog post describes what’s changed.

This update is live now on the website. The Android app will be updated in the coming days, and the iOS app will be updated in the coming weeks.

Expanded Single Player

Although I’ve always viewed Warzone’s multi-player as the best way to play it, there are surprisingly a lot of people who only play single-player. Those people haven’t gotten much love in terms of features over the years, but today they get some!

When single-player was first added in 2009, it was primarily designed to act as a tutorial to teach players how to play before they jumped into multi-player. Initially, it only had 5 levels! (three normal levels and two challenges). A 6th level was added shortly after and then eventually a tutorial level.

In 2016, single-player was expanded to 35 levels. It was still a tutorial of sorts, as most of the levels introduced a new concept or game mechanic. Community levels were also added at this time, which as exploded in popularity as they now approach 10,000 published levels!

With the Warzone release in 2017, offline play support was added.

Starting today, the single-player campaign is being expanded to a whopping 127 levels!

These are divided into two parts: The first 36 levels are still a tutorial, introducing new Warzone features (one was added to the previous 35 to introduce commerce mode, which didn’t exist in 2016). The remaining are some of the best community levels that have been copied into the main campaign to show them off more broadly.

In order to accomodate adding so many new levels, some of the way the app treats levels had to be re-worked. Prior to this update, all single-player levels in the campaign were embedded in the app. This was great as it allowed for offline play, but it wouldn’t scale to 127 levels since embedding all of the maps into the app would make the app too large. With this update, the app will download the levels and maps from the server for all levels after World War Pixel. To help enable offline play, the app will pre-download the next 5 levels in the campaign to your device ahead of time. This will enable you to play five levels without an internet connection. You can see this work if you look at the single-player tab and look at the bottom right corner of a level’s thumbnail. If this level is not cached on your device, a small internet icon will appear to let you know that you need an active internet connection to play that level.

This update also now adds the ability to skip levels if you’re having a hard time with them. If the app detects that you’re struggling with a level, it will ask you if you want to skip. You can always come back to a skipped level in the future.

Additionally, due to the increased level count, player’s profiles no longer list the names of all the levels, as this would get too long. Instead, it simply shows the number of wins, gold stars, and skips.

Other Changes

– All: Made level World War Pixel easier since it’s no longer the final level.
– All: Profile pages now show some quickmatch ratings.
– All: Fixed a bug in team games with huge numbers of orders. Thanks to krinid for reporting this.
– Unity/UJS: The stroke opacity on a map’s bonus links are now displayed correctly. Thanks to NinjaNic for reporting this.
– Unity/UJS: Improved the quickmatch tutorial.
– Unity/UJS: Links sent in chat by players using the red color are now white instead of blue.
– Unity: If no open tournament is available, the My Games page will now show a random open game instead.
– Unity: Replaced the multi-player “Play now” arrow with a less intrusive button highlight.
– UJS: Fixed a bug with the map designer that made bonuses not register their bonus link right after being added. Thanks to Bane for reporting this.
– Website: The “Switch Web Mode” link is being moved into the Account Settings page. The old link will remain for a bit to tell people where to go if they need to switch.