Call Of Duty: Warzone Season 3 is live, but we’re still waiting for its giant monsters

Raven Software’s military battle royale Call of Duty: Warzone sees the arrival of Season 3, Classified Arms, today, which just went live at 9am PDT/5pm BST. The battle pass is also dropping for Call of Duty: Vanguard. In addition to new guns and a special timed event featuring Godzilla and King Kong (because of course), this season also sees the debut of some new types of private matches – although Raven have qualified that the latter are temporarily disabled due to “stability issues ”. At least that gives us time to download the 39GB update for Warzone, but remember to leave 13GB extra room for the patch to copy.

Season 3 of Warzone is bringing new modes including a fresh spin on Iron Trials for the Caldera map, some beefy weapons to take on larger than usual opponents we’ll talk about in a moment, and introduces a new operator. Warzone’s latest fresh face is Mateo Hernandez, a Navy tail-gunner from Texas with immigrant roots, who sports the new M1916 marksman rifle and can be unlocked straight away if you fork out for the battle pass. Another new weapon this season is the fast-firing Nikita AVG assault rifle, but that’s more suited to close quarters and mid-range than the M1916.

By far the most interesting thing about Warzone Season 3 is the galaxy-brain idea to shove ginormous silver-screen kaiju darlings Godzilla and King Kong into the game for a limited-time event later in the season on May 11th, what’s being called with a straight face ‘Operation Monarch’. It seems like a weirdly out of date tie-in with Universal Pictures’ Monsterverse movies, but the sight of classic monstrosities like Godz and Kong tearing up maps while CoD players flit around them like gnats has majorly fired up my interest in Warzone. Does anyone else remember Evolve?

Call of Duty: Warzone is free-to-play on Battle.net, but the new battle pass will set you back 1000 COD points or £9/$11. Check out the full patch notes for the complete list of bug fixes and balance changes.