Editor’s Note: A lawsuit has been filed against Activision Blizzard by the California Department of Fair Employment and Housing, which alleges the company has engaged in abuse, discrimination, and retaliation against its female employees. Activision Blizzard has denied the allegations. The full details of the Activision Blizzard lawsuit (content warning: rape, suicide, abuse, harassment) are being updated as new information becomes available.
The new Caldera Pacific map has made a lot of changes to Call of Duty: Warzone and many of them have improved the battle royale and made it feel new. Since the game's release in March 2020, Warzone's large-scale action has taken place on the map Verdansk, with the smaller Rebirth Island map the setting for its mini-royale game mode. Verdansk was very popular among players, with lots of different points of interest that also contained parts of maps from the previous Call of Duty titles.
Now in 2021, Warzone is going back in time as it gets integrated with Call of Duty: Vanguard's WW2 setting. With the integration, players will be able to use the new WW2 weapons they have been unlocking and leveling in Vanguard, as well as the new operators and perks. Verdansk was given a makeover to fit the 1984 setting of Black Ops Cold War, but many players wanted something new altogether, so it makes sense to give them a new map that is set in the same time period as Vanguard.
In addition to giving players a new environment to explore, Caldera needed to include big changes to Warzone, in general, to bring back old players and draw in new ones. Warzone was an instant success, but over time many became frustrated with the minimal changes to the map, the underwhelming and broken limited time events, and Call of Duty's huge hacker problem. For Warzone Pacific to be a success, Caldera needed to be bright and colorful, have different POIs compared to Verdansk, and bring new things that had not been seen in the game before. If Caldera was just going to be a re-skin of Verdansk, players would quickly become bored of it and begin to complain about the same issues. Thankfully, Caldera has been the biggest update Warzone has ever received, and has made a lot of positive changes to the game.
Warzone Pacific's Aircraft Adds Exciting New Gameplay Element
One of the biggest changes players will first notice when playing Caldera will be the aircraft shooting at them from above. Previously, players could find helicopters around Verdansk that could be used to transport a player and their team around the map to get to the best spots before the zone collapsed. Now with Warzone's new Gulag changes, players can sometimes find themselves in the cockpit of a fighter plane when they spawn back in. The planes are a lot of fun, pilots can fire the guns themselves and there is an additional spot for a teammate to shoot their own guns at enemies down below. If a pilot flies close enough to the ground, they will also automatically highlight nearby enemies for their squates to see.
Helicopters were only just getting off the ground in the latter stages of WW2, so it wouldn't make sense for them to feature in Caldera, but they do. The planes are more fragile than the helicopters and can be shot down by the anti-aircraft guns around the map, but they are much faster and harder to hit. Warzone's planes would be an appropriate replacement for helicopters if they were removed altogether, and players who master them can give their squad a significant advantage.
Caldera's Layout Separates It From Verdansk In CoD: Warzone
When Call of Duty revealed Caldera's map and POIs it was clear to many that it would be a big departure from Verdansk. The original Warzone map became much denser as players worked their way into the map, with areas such as Downtown, Train Station, and Stadium often being hotspots for action. Caldera has taken the opposite direction, with many of its big areas like Capital and Arsenal located at the edge of the map. Previously, players would often drop outside and work their way inwards as the circle progressed which often made gameplay quite slow, Caldera's layouts should encourage players to work their way outwards as the zone moves, hopefully resulting in more forward-facing combat.
Caldera should also present plenty of opportunities for Vanguard maps to appear in Warzone. Players already knew that the classic Call of Duty map Shipment would appear after some players managed to look at parts of Caldera before it was released due to a camera glitch on Shipment when it was added to Vanguard. Caldera's size and layout should allow parts of large multiplayer maps or even some of the small maps in their entirety to appear in the game. Caldera's new layout coupled with its bright, vibrant color scheme makes it feel fresh and a far cry from the concrete-grey buildings of Verdansk that players navigated for nearly two years.
Warzone's Richochet Anti-Cheat Finally Handles Hacker Problem
The biggest problem Warzone has had over the last year has been the cheaters. Over the game's first year, developer Raven Software had banned over 500,000 cheaters. Despite its best efforts to stop hackers, they never stopped and many people quit playing in the latter seasons of Warzone and Black Ops Cold War out of frustration. When it was announced that the developers had been developing a brand-new anti-cheat software, many players were relieved and hopeful that they could return to the game and play in a fair environment. RICOCHET is a kernel-level driver software that will be able to detect any programs that affect the Warzone system, and then will ban the offender on their system and their .
Frustratingly, RICOCHET took a while to deliver on its promises. RICOCHET was scheduled to come to Warzone on the first day of the Pacific update, but it only began rolling out to different parts of the world over two weeks after the update went live. The anti-cheat released in the Asia-Pacific region on December 15 and has now finally made its way to the North American region. With RICOCHET now fully available, the matchmaking experience in Warzone is far improved. Hackers are far less frequent, with players usually going multiple matches without encountering a cheater. No anti-cheat is perfect, some matches will still have a hacker in them, but the difference between the game now and how it was two months ago is worlds apart.
Caldera needs some changes of its own, but so far the map has been the best thing to happen to Warzone since its release. The new map is colorful and has engaging POIs, and the gameplay changes bring new elements for players to master. To keep players happy, however, Caldera is going to need to have better updates and limited-time events than Verdansk had. Raven Software needs to really lean into the WW2 setting, and should not be afraid to remove parts of the map and add new things to it. If it can do that consistently over the next year, then Call of Duty: Warzone should continue to be one of the best battle royale games out there.
