Where did Warzone come from?
Let me take you back to the spring of 2020 before Verdansk. The world was shrouded in the darkness of COVID-19, and we were thrust into a lockdown that none of us understood. We were no longer allowed to socialise in the outside world, while every sore throat, cough, or sneeze created an unbearable anxiety among those we did have contact with. It was a nightmare for the extroverts of the world, yet even introverts longed for human contact.
Little did we know, there was a safe haven waiting for us. My generation experienced Call of Duty’s heyday from the original Modern Warfare (2007), through Modern Warfare 2 (2009) and Modern Warfare 3 (2011), including the absolute classics of Black Ops 1 (2010) and Black Ops 2 (2012). After Black Ops 2, though, the Call of Duty franchise seemed to be on a steady decline, with fans becoming overwhelmed by the yearly releases, resulting in them having to pay full game prices for minor adaptations of the same concept, which had run dry. Every year, we see Nuketown or Shipment revamped or restyled, yet people still buy the game for the nostalgia of their younger years.
Then came Warzone. Call of Duty had already tried a Battle Royale mode with Blackout on Black Ops 4 (2018), with reasonable success. Yet it was Warzone that put the company back on top of the FPS industry. Not even the most optimistic of developers could’ve predicted how popular Warzone was going to be, because nobody would’ve thought that we’d all be stuck in our houses with nothing to do for months. The biggest reason for Warzone’s success, though, was the map we played it in. Verdansk.
The Call of Duty Divide
In the original Verdansk, the balance between skilled players and casual players was perfect. Skilled players could push teams by collecting vehicles and starting Bounty contracts. They could pop a UAV when close to targets and use equipment like thermite and C4 to flush players out of their hiding places.
Likewise, casual players could hold down buildings like Airport Tower or Prison Roof by staying prone and watching the one area from which players could appear. The joy of killing your bounty target was matched by the thrill of killing the poor soul who had wandered so innocently into your trap. Everybody was happy, and everybody could win. Where the final circle ended is often what decided who won, so everyone had an equal chance of being the last alive.
Then lockdown ended, and the casual players returned to their normal lives. As Activision scrambled to recover the numbers they’d lost, through circumstances which were out of their control, they made multiple map changes. Verdansk was left behind, followed by Caldera (2021) and then Al Mazrah (2022). But the maps weren’t the only changes.
To regain the casual players, Al Mazrah was a slowed-down version of Warzone. Players could no longer slide cancel or travel around the map anywhere near as fast as they could on the previous maps. Then there was the backpack system, which seemed to be designed to frustrate players and confuse them into despair so that when they did finally come across an enemy team, they were completely unequipped to fight them.
For Urzikstan (2023), the developers completely turned the game upside down. They gave up trying to please the casual players and instead pandered to their core audience. The Sweats. Ziplines were placed on every single building and everywhere else. There were redeploy balloons and drones that could propel you out of the Earth’s atmosphere. These changes ensured that casual players deleted Warzone from their consoles, instead heading over to more friendly games like Fortnite (Zero Build) and Fall Guys. Warzone had become similar to Fortnite in that once the youngsters had become too good at the game, no one else could compete.
Then the Verdansk return was announced
Fast forward to late 2024, and the rumours of the return of Verdansk surfaced. Nearly five years had passed since its original release, and all we had left were the memories of staying up until 4 am, pushing for that elusive win before bed. Warzone had become unplayable. Even the biggest YouTube streamers were debating the cause of the death of Warzone and whether Call of Duty would survive it. So, the developers relied on the one thing that had saved them so many times before. Nostalgia. And in March 2025, they announced that Verdansk was returning.
The overwhelming feeling among fans, old and new, was not one of euphoria. Instead, there lingered an overwhelming feeling of doubt. After the past few years, how could anyone trust the developers to get it right? Some people didn’t want its return, simply because they didn’t want to stain their old memories with new nightmares of horror. It’s not underselling it to say that playing Warzone with our friends during lockdown and the pandemic improved the mental well-being of millions all over the world.
Understandably, people didn’t want to ruin those memories by being bullied off the game by demons who have mastered the new omni-movement system in ways that even the Devs didn’t think of. Every time I see a robot running around, I think better of fighting them, hoping instead that they’ll lose to someone third-partying their gun fight. That person won’t be me because I’ll be hiding in a bush.
As gameplay details were being released, though, it seemed that the game was heading back to its original format. No more ziplines or redeploy balloons. No more stupid backpacks either. Just pure Battle Royale simplicity. If you get killed, you go to the gulag, and if you die in there too, then you’re dead. Leave resurgence for the small maps. Verdansk is brutal and ice-cold like the frozen dam at the top of the map. The way it should be. After all this good news, I was counting down the days until its re-release.
Where are we dropping?
In my Rick Grimes skin, I hover over the map menu to see where the circle is. Prison finish, great! Do I camp the roof with no Loadout, or do I loot up somewhere else first? I decided to land on a helicopter and fly to a building. After choosing a Police Station out of the way, I land on the roof and drop down the ladder. I blink and I’m dead. The killcam shows me walking round the corner before getting my head taken off by a sniper. That was my first introduction to the HDR, the gun that has haunted my dreams in the weeks since Verdansk returned to our lives.
After three weeks, I still hadn’t won. Solos are chaos, and duos with my friend, whom I’ve been fighting enemies with since the original Modern Warfare 2, felt impossible. At first, we relied on vehicles to protect us from the wrath of the HDR, but after being sniped out of the passenger seat for the seventieth time, and being blown up by a spring mine, we decided to fly into the centre of the first circle and ditch the helicopter. After a week or so of levelling up our weapons, we decided we could compete, and this led to a 2v1 scenario for the win, in our favour. We still lost.
One game, we were landing in when my teammate decided to chase someone out of the sky. As he was getting closer to the concrete, he noticed that the person he was chasing seemed to be moving quicker than him, only to realise that he’d been chasing his own shadow. That was the final straw. I even considered whether the new Casual mode morally counted as a win. After being told I was being ridiculous, we decided to call up our friends with higher K/D’s.
At this point, we rarely finished outside the top ten, and as we’d spent most of the Easter weekend on our PlayStations, we decided that we’d have one last try at midnight. Things were looking bleak when the fifth circle arrived, and only one of our friends was still alive in Downtown. But as heroes do, he started a Most Wanted contract and hid on the stairs of a tall building. Another teammate won his gulag, and miraculously, no one found them.
We returned to a multitude of Loadout guns on the floor, dropped by enemy teams who had perished. I picked up my gun, got downed three times but revived, I got my teammate killed, but avenged him by downing his attacker. Then I got downed by the last player, but our friend who had done the Most Wanted, swooped in to get the final kill and hand us our first win. We thought we were too old now to compete, but there’s life in the old dogs yet.
How does it compare to the original?
I’d imagine that if you even thought about running the latest version of Warzone on your PlayStation 4, it would cause an explosion equal to the Big Bang. Thankfully, the PlayStation 5 looks and feels incredible in-game.
Graphically, the new version of Verdansk is vastly superior to the original. The map has been rebuilt from the ground up, and apart from the bushes (which I used to enjoy becoming invisible in), every detail has been improved. Something that separates Verdansk from its predecessors is the wide array of colours on show, in comparison to the desert of Al Mazrah and the grey/green shade which overwhelmed Urzikstan. All I can remember about Caldera is the big mountain in the middle, so I’m glad that that map has been singed almost completely from my memory. The other maps were completely lacking in character, whereas Verdansk supplies it in abundance.
The game’s audio is a hotly contested topic, but my relatively cheap headset manages to pick up every noise when enemies are close by. This may be due to my slow playstyle, but I’ve never fought an enemy I didn’t hear coming. The Proximity Chat is also a welcome change from the previous Verdansk. It’s always a laugh when rival teams are threatening you as you land in their location.
Like before, there are some amazing guns hidden in boxes. Unfortunately, the other team always seem to find a gold HDR, while I’m still applying the one shield I’ve found. By the time I’ve finally found a gun worthy of replacing the garbage Feng, I’ve been hit by a HDR bullet with so much velocity that my body has been flung a couple of metres from where I was standing. Money is also particularly difficult to build up, but again, I feel like that helps the balance of the game, allowing the casual players to kill the core players now and again, rather than the core players slaughtering all the casuals one after the other.
The last major change is Ghost. Everyone used Heartbeat Sensors back in 2020, but now they’re hardly used. The days when you could hide out in the hills and have a chat with an old friend are over. Now, if you stay still and your Ghost perk becomes inactive, enemy teams will find you, and they will kill you.
Will Verdansk save Warzone?
In my opinion, it should. The answer to this question truly relies on what Activision consider to be a success. I’m sure they’ve realised by now that they’ll never hit the numbers that they did during lockdown, but that’s ok. They should view what they achieved at the time as a miracle. The stars aligned for them, and they made a lot of money from it. But this new iteration of Warzone is special in its own right.
I know I only have the one win, but I’ve put enough hours into this game to have experienced it fully. It’s a lot of fun, and to anyone who is still uncertain about whether they want to return to Verdansk, I promise it’s not just the nostalgia trick that we’ve seen over and over again. The game is genuinely as enjoyable as it ever was.
