After months of speculation, play the original Verdansk map again when Season 3 arrives on April 3. Verdansk's return is exciting as the battle royale celebrates its fifth anniversary. Still, there is a lot of pressure on Verdansk and Season 3 to hit the ground running as Warzone has struggled since the launch of Call of Duty: Black Ops 6.

Activision knows this, choosing to delay the launch of Season 3 by two weeks to make sure it is smooth and up to players' expectations. If Verdansk arrives and is relatively problem-free at the start of Season 3, it could succeed in bringing a lot of players back, but Warzone will need to add a lot more to save itself.

Verdansk Won't Save Call Of Duty By Itself

There Are Fundamental Problems With Warzone

It's no secret that Warzone, and Call of Duty in general, has been struggling with player counts falling since Black Ops 6's strong launch. Warzone in particular has suffered from a lack of new content compared to Black Ops 6, which has had multiple new Zombies maps and limited-time game modes in multiplayer for its crossover events.

Verdansk's return creates an opportunity for some Warzone-exclusive content for players to engage with during the launch, and there should be a focus on Warzone content going forward to keep players coming back. However, if Activision doesn't address the still-prevalent cheating problem in Call of Duty, then players won't stick around regardless of whether there is new content or not.

Warzone Is Completely Different Now

So Much Has Changed In Five Years

Another big obstacle Verdansk has to overcome is that the game it's returning to isn't the same as it was in 2020. Since Warzone's original release, there have been new maps and changes to the engine the game runs on. The arrival of Warzone Pacific and the Caldera map gave the game a new lease on life, but it was eventually shut down and players couldn't use the skins and weapons they had unlocked and purchased in the new version of the game.

Since then, Call of Duty's monetization has become more aggressive and the collaboration events have brought in lots of new weapon and character skins that have nothing to do with Call of Duty. Warzone did have purchasable skins in 2020, but they were much more subtle and military-themed. Having a lobby full of players dressed as The Terminator or a Ninja Turtle is going to take away a lot of the nostalgia players will initially feel when they start playing on Verdansk.

The current Warzone map Urzikstan is a good map overall, with a nice balance of open and closed areas that have some resemblance to Verdansk. However, the addition of redeploy drones and ziplines, and the weakness of the vehicles have had a detrimental impact on the pacing of the gameplay.

In 2020, players had to really plan out their movement across Verdansk and make use of vehicles to beat the circle, while looking out for explosive attacks from hidden enemies. The original Warzone's slower pacing was one of Verdansk's best features, and if all the modern features are kept in the game when Verdansk returns, it won't feel the same.

A Barebones Mode Would Give Players An Old-School Challenge

Sometimes Less Is More

One simple addition Warzone can make to get more players in Verdansk is to add a playlist option that takes away some of the modern Warzone elements to recreate the original Warzone feeling even more, similar to the old barebones game modes that were available in the original Modern Warfare 2 and Black Ops games.

A barebones mode for Warzone would only be playable on the Verdansk map and would remove lots of the current equipment and killstreaks available in Urzikstan, like redeploy drones and Utility Boxes. Removing those and improving the resilience of vehicles would go a long way to recreating the flow of Warzone's original gameplay, and are easy to implement.

The barebones mode could go even further and restrict what weapons are available, both as ground loot and in players' loadouts. Character skins could be restricted too, with the more outlandish skins that Call of Duty is now filled with being replaced with the military-themed skins that were popular during the start of Call of Duty: Warzone. These changes would go a long way to recreating the experience of the original Verdansk, but are unlikely to happen as players don't like not being able to use things they've already paid for.