Many things have changed in Warzone since its original launch, but none of them hurt the community more than the farewell to Verdansk, the original map of Warzone. Since then, Warzone hosted multiple different maps, but none of them were able to bring back the same joy to the community as Verdansk.
Activision has never talked about bringing Verdansk back to Warzone officially, but more rumors surface around an internal intention at the studio to return to Verdansk once again. This time around, however, we have a verification from Tom Henderson, one of the highly credible insiders in gaming with a great backtrack.
Henderson confirmed the rumors originating from X/Twitter user “bob.” who claimed recently that Verdansk will be released “during the mid lifecycle of Black Ops 6” for Warzone in early 2025, while Urzikstan will remain the main Warzone map in Season 1 with some gameplay and map updates as well as Ranked Play.
According to the main source, Verdansk was supposed to be launched with Black Ops 6 Season 1, but the plans have now changed, and the Urzikstan updates will serve as compensation for the delay.
Based on Henderson’s report, Activision originally intended to release a new map for Warzone named Avalon with Black Ops 6, and while it is almost ready, the company decided to push it back to Fall 2025 when the next Call of Duty comes out, replacing Verdansk instead.
The insider claims that Verdansk was not anywhere on the internal roadmap, but the massive success of Fortnite OG convinced Activision that returning to the roots in Warzone for one year could bring back a lot of players to the game once again. Fortnite managed to reach the highest amount of concurrent players in its history when the OG season launched.
Verdansk was the main Warzone map for almost two years until it was replaced by Caldera in December 2021, one of the most criticized maps in Warzone’s history. The next year, Call of Duty updated its game engine and introduced Warzone 2.0 with Al Mazrah becoming the new map for the game. While it received better impressions from players over Caldera, Verdansk was still the most favorite map among the community.
Warzone’s current map is Urzikstan, which was launched with Call of Duty Modern Warfare 3. As it appears, the map will remain active a bit more than its original life cycle now until Verdanks gets ready for release.
It remains unknown if Activision will make any changes or improvements to the original Verdansk, but we should probably learn more when the official confirmation is shared.
