Call of Duty Black Ops Cold War’s Outbreak mode will be “even bigger” in the future, according to a Tweet from Treyarch Studios, and that change may be related to the upcoming Call of Duty: Warzone map.
The Outbreak Zone is about to get even bigger.#Zombies pic.twitter.com/wGh6JJpcH6
— Treyarch Studios (@Treyarch) March 19, 2021
Accompanying the tweet is a gif from the Dark Aether portal that players use in Outbreak to travel to different areas. At the end of the gif, the portal opens into what looks like an existing multiplayer map from Black Ops Cold War: Sanatorium. Sanatorium was released during Season 1 of Black Ops Cold War and is located in the Urals, which is the current home to various game modes. It’s also the rumored location for the next Call of Duty: Warzone map after Warzone’s nuke blows Verdansk through the roof.
And now that zombies have recently joined Warzone and continue to move locations on the map, it’s even clearer that the battle royale is getting closer to Black Ops Cold War and away from Modern Warfare. A recent Warzone leak points to a Zombie event that will destroy Verdansk, with audio files including dialogue such as “Verdansk is gone” and “avoid the infected at all costs.”
CharlieIntel suggests that he is arguing that it is “almost confirmed” that the Ural Mountains will be the next Warzone map. There are currently three maps for the 40-player Fireteam modes: Alpine, Sanatorium, and Ruka, all located in the Ural Mountains of Russia. Black Ops Cold War Season 2 added another map of the Ural Mountains (Gololva), and Call of Duty hackers have pointed out that all map names start with ‘wz’ in the game’s source code.
Considering that the maps are already large enough to accommodate 40-person games and the immense Outbreak mode, it would be easy to format these existing maps in a location the size of a battle royale. And just like when players realized that the Call of Duty: Modern Warfare maps were becoming part of the larger Verdansk map, it’s not that hard to imagine Treyarch and Activision doing the same with Black Ops Cold War. .
