There was a lot of fan demand for Call Of Duty: Warzone to bring back the Verdansk map and yet Activision could still take it away a second time.
Amid chatter of dwindling player counts and a possible shutdown, Call Of Duty: Warzone reintroduced its original map, Verdansk, as part of its season three update earlier this month.
Considering there have been fan demands for Verdansk to return to Warzone ever since it was removed in 2021 (with it even being nuked in-game and replaced with a new map), you’d think long-time players would be thrilled to see it back.
Apparently, that has been the case, with Verdansk’s return proving successful for publisher Activision. However, it doesn’t sound like its inclusion is guaranteed to be permanent.
IGN recently spoke with Warzone game director Pete Actipis and creative director Etienne Pouliot about how they approached bringing back Verdansk and how they felt about the response from players.
While there’s no way to check exact player numbers for Warzone, Call Of Duty’s overall player numbers on Steam did see a noticeable jump once season three began on April 3.
Beforehand, there were under 59,000 players, but that leapt up to almost 140,000 over the following weekend, according to SteamDB.
No doubt Verdansk’s return was a big part of that and Actipis and Pouliot were naturally asked if the map will remain a permanent inclusion this time or if this is just a one-off.
They kept their answer vague, but while fans shouldn’t worry about Verdansk suddenly vanishing any time soon, it doesn’t sound like there are plans to keep the map around forever.
‘We brought Verdansk back for a reason. It wasn’t just to bring it back for a season and kind of say goodbye to it again,’ explained Actipis, pointing out that a lot of work went into recreating the map.
As a reminder, Verdansk had to be rebuilt from the ground up and while it’s mostly a 1:1 recreation, some minor changes and quality-of-life additions were made.
‘So for the time being Verdansk is sticking around and this is just the beginning of the Verdansk 2025 journey, and then we’ll see how things go from there,’ continued Actipis, adding, ‘So again, no confirmation or anything on the strategy on the maps moving forward.’
At the very least, it seems Activision has more plans for Verdansk throughout the rest of the year, though Actipis and Pouliot naturally kept quiet about what those are.
As such, you can expect the map to stick around even after this year’s Call Of Duty game launches. No official information has been shared yet, but rumours say it’s surprisingly another Black Ops game despite Call Of Duty: Black Ops 6 only launching last year.
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