By Prabhnoor Singh
Call of Duty: Warzone began to ramp up toward the end of the season with the “Destruction of Verdansk” which put the future of Verdansk in doubt.
From this rubble, Warzone traveled back to a new version of the map where every building and object in Verdansk has traveled back in time to 1984. The run-down of the buildings are new, the streets are more vibrant, and there’s grass and flora everywhere to mimic what the landscape would have looked like before the pollution that has taken place over the past 37 years.
The airport hasn’t been destroyed, and there is a new control tower, an in-construction Verdansk Stadium, a new Airplane Factory, Radar Array, and much, much more. Call of Duty began the groundwork for the new map weeks before they had said they would. The idea started with a surprise zombie outbreak in Warzone. As the outbreak intensified, Verdansk was nuked to cleanse the area, and players were left to fight on Rebirth Island before they all time-traveled back to Verdansk ‘84.
Introducing the new map is seemingly a permanent change. Despite this new world being much different than the old one, developer Raven says it will never return to the original map, Verdansk 2020. Associative creative director Amos Hodge used a studio broadcast to say, “Players don’t know it, but current day Verdansk, they’ll never play in the state again. Current day Verdank is gone and it’s not coming back.”
Apparently, the change hasn’t happened just for narrative reasons- they are fixing some legacy problems with the original Verdansk. They wanted to clean up the buggy areas, and they feel that now that the map is gone, they have the opportunity to fix those issues.
One of the most popular complaints they plan on fixing is the unclimbable rocks. The fact that your character can jump off a house, a 20 foot telephone pole, and much more and not die, but they can’t climb the one foot rocks on the side of a hill made everyone who played the game really mad. The rocks in the new map are luckily not as bad.
Verdansk ’84 adds seven new locations, and it fundamentally alters many more, making the area a more vibrant, slightly less rundown place than we’ve gotten used to. The separate Rebirth Island map is also currently shrouded in nighttime.
With 2021 Verdansk off the table (it did get nuked, after all), it remains a mystery where Warzone will head after its trip to 1984. The next Call of Duty game is reportedly set in World War 2, so a ’40s battlefield seems a possible location, but it’s entirely possible that, given its huge success, Warzone could head in entirely new directions after this.
