Gray Zone Warfare’s new test patch adds landing zones—but does little to resolve bigger issue

MADFINGER Games has just released the second patch for the Gray Zone Warfare public playtest. And while new landing zones and quality-of-life updates are good, one of the game’s biggest issues is still rampant.

Nine new landing zones have been added to the Gray Zone Warfare public playtest servers, but the lack of available helicopters to take players to and from these landing zones remains an issue. Even as the game has dipped in popularity slightly after its red-hot launch, players such as myself have been left stuck calling for a helicopter for anywhere between 10 to 20 minutes.

The new patch does include some minor relief toward the helicopter traffic issue, via the addition of pickup and destination information displayed on the helicopters themselves. With this addition, players will be able to see where the birds in the air are headed and can hop on someone else’s helicopter if it’s heading in the same direction. This takes the burden off the players to have to coordinate helicopter ride sharing themselves as the UI will display the info for them.

While it can still be frustrating to be stuck in base, or terrifying to be out in the open at a contested landing zone while waiting for a helicopter, MADFINGER has been doing a good job of implementing positive changes during these public test patches. Today’s patch does include further improvements for another of GZW’s issues, rubberbanding.

Players looking to try out the new changes themselves can join the public test server by opening the Properties menu for GZW and Steam and selecting “public-experimental” in the dropdown list of the beta. Participating in the beta does not affect your progress on the live server. This is GZW’s largest public playtest so far, so players will be invited in waves.