Verdansk has been back in Call of Duty: Warzone for nearly a week, and it’s like it never left.
Back in 2020, Call of Duty launched Warzone, a Battle Royale style mode for the ever popular franchise. It was an immensely popular hit with longtime Call of Duty fans and new players. Then, in 202, with the release of the widely lauded Call of Duty: Vanguard, a new map was released called Caldera. From the start, there were very few people that thought the map was as good as Verdansk. There was too much open space, too many walls were able to be shot through, and players’ vision was frequently obstructed by the landscape.
A new problem arose around this time, something many Call of Duty players call the Fortniteification of the game. Ridiculous skins started being released where a player could become Rambo or a giant lizard or King Kong or any number of ridiculous things. Death animations became more and more wild. When killed, players started turning into rocks or gold or toxic gas or a rainbow or being banished to a dark realm. One could argue this started before Caldera, but it certainly took off then.
Then, continuing the trend of releasing a new map with a new game, Al Mazrah was released. Most players found this to be an improvement over Caldera, but it still never matched the glory of Verdansk. With Modern Warfare III came Urzikstan which, again, was an improvement, but still was not the same as the original Warzone map.
Now, finally, Verdansk has returned. With it, Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 Season 03 brings the Kilo 141 and the CR56 AMAX, two very popular guns on Verdansk that originally debuted in Modern Warfare (2019), and the HDR, a gigantic .50 caliber sniper rifle that allowed talented snipers to down enemies hundreds of meters away. Of course, all the Black Ops 6 guns are usable, but these three, and the Kar98K of course, are dominating.
Maybe this is just confirmation bias, or maybe I’m simply noticing it less, but it seems to me that I’m even seeing less of the ridiculous skins, guns, and animation effects while playing Verdansk as well. Maybe I’m just getting old and Call of Duty knows my age and is placing me in lobbies with other oldies that don’t like being turned into purple sparkles when killed, but it sure has been nice.
There have also been substantial changes to movement within Warzone to make it feel much more in line with the original game. It’s been slowed down, made a bit chunkier and, more or less, is the same movement system from Modern Warfare with omnimovement added in. It feels fantastic. In fact, it feels better than any modern Call of Duty’s movement system. The omnimovement system keeps it fresh and quick when it needs to be, but the slowness of it when compared to Black Ops 6 makes it tactical. Rushing into a house with an SMG, jumping, sliding, diving, sprinting non stop, running circles around enemies, something that was very annoying on other maps, is only an option if one is very, very good at it. I’ve only encountered someone doing that a handful of times and I’ve pretty frequently gotten the upper hand.
Quite a few of the commodities from Warzone have also been removed. There are no Respawn Flares, no Gulag Tokens, no backpacks, no Redeploy Balloons, or Specialist Bonuses. Armor and Armor Boxes are harder to come by, although not impossible, Self Revives, as far as I can tell, do not drop in the world, cash is more sparse, and orange crates are actually hard to find. The game as a whole just feels much more tactical and not like it’s trying to rival Fortnite at every single turn. Time will only tell how long that lasts for, but, as of right now, Verdansk is so back.
Call of Duty has had quite a few comic books published throughout the years. Black Ops, Modern Warfare, and more games have had comics focused on them, especially the zombies game mode and the character Ghost.
Have you been enjoying Call of Duty: Warzone since the return of Verdansk? Let us know in the comments!