With the end of the 2021 Call of Duty League season now four months behind us, the format and start date for the 2022 CDL season have been officially announced.
The league revealed today that there will be four regular-season Majors in 2022, similar to the five stages ending with Majors in the 2021 season. OpTic Texas will host the first Major in early 2022.
For each Major, there will first be three weeks of online qualifying matches where each team will play five series to determine their seeding for the tournament. The top eight teams will then compete in “one week of bracket play” in front of fans at a LAN event.
These eight-team Majors will consist of a new knockout bracket in which every squad will start in the winners bracket. Last season, Majors featured all 12 teams but six teams automatically started the event in the losers bracket.
Just like in 2021, the top eight teams will compete for the championship at the end of the season. But instead of byes for the top two teams and elimination matches for the bottom two teams, every squad will start CoD Champs 2022 in winners round one. This is a welcome change since teams like the Los Angeles Thieves and Florida Mutineers went one and done at the 2021 CDL Playoffs without a chance to make a losers bracket run.
There will also be a Pro-Am midseason tournament alongside Call of Duty: Warzone events throughout the season. Many fans of the esport have been waiting to see Activision and the CDL invest in its amateur scene for a long time. While the scope of the tournament is still unknown, it’s a step in the right direction for the competitive CoD scene.
Similar to last year, there will be a Kickoff Classic to unofficially start the 2022 season. All 12 teams will be heading to Texas to compete at the Esports Stadium Arlington in front of a live audience. More details on the format and tickets are “coming soon,” according to the CDL. The state-of-the-art stadium in the Dallas suburb hosted both the Stage Four and Stage Five Majors during the 2021 regular season, with the latter being open to spectators.
The CDL originally tweeted a video that said the four Majors for the 2022 regular season will be hosted by OpTic Texas, the Minnesota RØKKR, the Toronto Ultra, and the New York Subliners. But that tweet has since been deleted.
The 2022 Call of Duty League regular season will start on Feb. 4, 2022, with online matches ahead of the season’s first Major.
