Verdansk Marks Call of Duty Warzone’s Triumphant Return to Form

Call of Duty Warzone is emerging in popularity once again – a return to form thanks to the reimplementation of popular map Verdansk as a part of the season 3 update. After this map was released on April 3 alongside a casual game mode, concurrent player numbers for Warzone jumped up. Warzone’s Twitch viewership also hit a highest peak viewer count since 2022. 

In an exclusive interview with IGN, Pete Actipis, game developer for Warzone, and Etienne Pouliot, Creative Director for the Call of Duty franchise, shared their unique insights regarding the revamped map. 

“The one thing you can say about Warzone, it’s constantly changing for good or for bad,” Pete Actipis said. “When we talked about bringing Verdansk back, it was very important for us to bring back a nostalgic moment in time as best as we could and be respectful of that as well.”

“On the gameplay side, we wanted to make sure that we looked at all the design principles and all the reasons that we added the things that we did back then, and are they still viable?”

Peter Actipies delved into community feedback, “post-launch, right now it’s getting great feedback from the community. They seem to really be enjoying it. We’re players too, so we wanted to build an experience that we fell in love with back in 2020.”

Etienne Pouliot elaborates more on the design philosophies present in Verdansk: 

“We remade everything from the ground, the sky, the player visibility, the audio. There is a lot of stuff that we put a lot of energy in. And we see the result right now. We were playing the game and we were like, ‘yeah, it feels great.’

“We were just eager to give it to the player. And the answer is really successful right now. So we are really, really happy. And just like Pete mentioned, I think it’s only a beginning and we’ll continue to challenge ourselves to see if we need to make some changes, improvements.”

According to the developers, Verdansk is sticking around – this marks “just the beginning of the Verdansk 2025 journey.” They did not confirm anything regarding their content strategy for map updates.

Though Warzone is currently flourishing, there were rumours circulating that Activision would treat Call of Duty: Warzone 2 as the last iteration of the game if Verdansk failed to retain players. Though the rumor was never confirmed, it has been deemed a null point since Verdansk did not fail to retain players.