Call of Duty: Warzone Brings Back Hated Groot Skin with a New Look

Call of Duty's most controversial skin is back.

By Cade Onder

Call of Duty: Warzone has brought back the Gaia skin (AKA Groot) after a prolonged absence. The Call of Duty franchise used to have a bunch of generic characters running around in the battlefield, many of them nameless and indistinguishable from an ordinary grunt. Then games like Fortnite proved you could make a killing by selling new skins and characters for $20 a pop. Now there are tons of crossovers, special skins for original Call of Duty characters, and more. Although these skins only have cosmetic benefits, some players have been able to utilize them to get an upperhand in game. There have been a few examples of this over the years, primarily with players using them to blend into the environment and become harder to see.

The biggest example of this was with the Gaia skin, which was released back in October as part of the Spawn crossover. Gaia, AKA Groot, is a character that is basically a creepy looking tree. She's pretty slim and you can see right through the holes in her branches. It's a cool design, but her colors and the fact that she's semi-transparent made it easy for players to blend in with the environment and become more difficult to see. This offered a huge advantage and some argued it was pay-to-win since she was behind a paywall. After enough complaints, Sledgehammer Games took Gaia out of the game and promised to return her once she was all fixed up. Now, almost 2 months later, Gaia has made her glorious return. She still looks generally the same, but there have been some tweaks to make her more visible. For starters, the skin has a more visible gas exuding from her torso that makes it so even if she's laying down or trying to hide, she will stick out more. It's unclear if this will actually make Gaia too visible now, as that kind of effect may draw more attention than some other skins.

Nevertheless, it's not pay-to-win anymore. Some players are a bit frustrated since they paid to use her broken skin and don't want her anymore. Unfortunately, that's the nature of buying things that are clearly not working as intended to your advantage. They will almost always get fixed and then you will be forced to stick with the "fixed" version.

Warzone Issues

Despite this fix, Warzone was plagued with some other issues. The game had its big mid-season update earlier today and it was a nightmare. The update broke a lot of things in the game, rendering it almost unplayable in some instances. The create-a-class menu was unusable, getting your loadout would cause the game to bug out, and there were all kinds of other issues that baffled players and made them wonder how something this busted was able to be released in the first place. As of right now, Raven Software is working to fix it. 

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