Call of Duty: Warzone can confidently be called a great success. The Battle Royale, originally designed as a free-to-play bonus for the 2019 CoD: Modern Warfare, still has hundreds of thousands of players every day and a successor has already been confirmed.
But it’s not all sunshine and roses: fans have been wanting more locations for a long time, which vary as part of a map rotation and thus provide more variety. Now, however, an important reason has been given why you don’t hope for new maps should.
The size of Warzone is insane
With Verdansk and Caldera, Warzone – apart from the smaller map Rebirth Island – only has two large maps, which, as is well known, cannot be easily switched back and forth. As of December 2021, the action only takes place in Caldera’s Pacific lands, while Verdansk has been disabled.
If you compare the display of Warzone with the genre competitors, you can easily understand the multiple desire for more variety. In Apex Legends, three of the four maps alternate every hour. After all, PUBG has one of five locations with each season and Fortnite only has one map, which is known to be revised very often.
Incidentally, the biggest unique selling point was just recently removed from Epic’s long-running hit. You can find out what is behind it and how long this condition lasts here:
more on the subject
Fortnite turns off the biggest unique selling point
CoD Warzone’s Live Operations Lead, Josh Bridge, recently answered questions from streamer TeePee in an interview. Among other things, he was of course asked about new maps and his answer was surprisingly direct:
The team would very gladly
absolutely insane. Josh Bridge points to the old console generation Xbox One / PlayStation 4, which would still be used by a large part of the player base.
Each update costs players: As is well known, these devices are often only equipped with 500 GB of storage space. According to Bridge, this technical hurdle even has a direct impact on the number of players in Warzone: With every major update that requires a correspondingly extensive download, you would lose players.
You can see the relevant part of that interview here:
Warzone not built to last
Josh Bridge is also frank in explaining why Warzone is constantly in danger of bursting at the seams. This is simply due to the technical conception of the game. Publisher Activision did not expect Warzone to become such a success, which is why you have to work with a non-optimal development pipeline.
Verdanks, for example, was never designed with the idea that more than 180 weapons would be added later. Ultimately, the development team seems to have to live with technical limitations that can no longer be easily eliminated afterwards. Nevertheless, you still have a map rotation on the screen.
And what about Warzone 2? After all, the successor should be planned differently from the start. It remains to be seen whether this will also make more maps possible. Josh Bridge hints that he likes the idea of finding out what else can be done with a big map and lots of players aside from classic battle royale. We already have all currently known information about Warzone 2 summarized.
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