It’s fair to say Verdansk is breathing new life into Call of Duty Warzone, and it couldn’t have come at a better time. The internet had declared Activision’s now five year-old battle royale “cooked” before the nostalgia-fueled Verdansk turned things around. Now, the internet has declared Warzone “back.” Didn't Activision nuke Verdansk? It doesn't seem to matter, as lapsed players who fondly remember Warzone as their lockdown game are returning to the map that started it all, and those who stuck with the game through thick and thin over the past five years are saying Warzone is more fun now than it’s been since it exploded onto the scene in 2020.
This back-to-basics gameplay experience was a deliberate design decision on the part of developers Raven and Beenox. Pete Actipis, game director on Warzone at Raven, and Etienne Pouliot, creative director at Beenox, both worked on the multi-studio effort to bring Warzone back. In this sweeping interview with IGN, the pair discuss how they went about it, the success of Verdansk’s Casual mode, reveal whether they considered limiting operator skins to mil-sim for a more 2020 feel, and answer the crucial question: is Verdansk here to stay?
Read on to find out.
IGN: I imagine I fit the typical profile, which is someone who played a lot of Warzone during lockdown and was enticed back by the return of Verdansk. Was that the point of all this, to get lapsed Warzone fans back in the game? And now it’s been out for a while, is that what you’re seeing happening?
Pete Actipis: We hit our fifth year anniversary for Warzone and we wanted to bring back Verdansk for quite some time now. It just felt like the right timing. When we were talking about bringing it back, it wasn't just bringing back the map. It was more than that. Over the last five years we have learned a lot, experimented with a lot. The one thing you can say about Warzone, it's constantly changing for good or for bad. It is something that we just try to keep evolving. And we listen to the players and we take some shots and sometimes they land, sometimes they don't. But when we talked about bringing Verdansk back, it was very important for us to bring back a nostalgic moment in time as best as we could and be respectful of that as well.
During Covid it was just a special time in the world, it was crazy, it was something that we all experienced together individually, but Warzone created this social experience in a way that was pretty new to Call of Duty. So we wanted to pay homage to that as best as we could. We looked at every single component of what made Warzone special back in 2020 and we wanted to really treat it right.
I'll let Etienne talk about the map side of it, but at least on the gameplay side, we wanted to make sure that we looked at all the design principles and all the reasons that we added the things that we did back then, and are they still viable? Are those still fun mechanics and loops? And if we were to bring them back, we wanted to make sure we did it with the right intent. And that's why I think it's stuck around so well. Post-launch, right now it's getting great feedback from the community. They seem to really be enjoying it. We're players too, so we wanted to build an experience that we fell in love with back in 2020. So yeah, it's worked out. We're really careful about what we do to the game right now because we hit that sweet spot of that nostalgia bit and people seem to be enjoying it. So we're pretty excited by it as players too.
Etienne Pouliot: We know that gaming in general goes pretty fast. Five years of Warzone just went by really, really fast, and we've tried so many things. But each day Verdansk was still in the discussion and in the bucket of ideas of, ‘oh we will need to return to that place someday.’
But it was just not a matter of, 'oh we're going to port that thing toward that new engine or that new Call of Duty.' It was really more like, ‘let's bring the best version of Verdansk.’ So, just to be sure that we remade everything from the ground, the sky, the player visibility, the audio. There is a lot of stuff that we put a lot of energy in. And we see the result right now. We were playing the game and we were like, 'yeah, it feels great.'
So we were just eager to give it to the player. And the answer is really successful right now. So we are really, really happy. And just like Pete mentioned, I think it's only a beginning and we'll continue to challenge ourselves to see if we need to make some changes, improvements.
IGN: The online sentiment does look positive right now, and you’ll know that the online sentiment across places like Reddit and social media has certainly not always been positive about Warzone. Is that something that you're seeing in the data? Are you seeing more people returning to play Warzone?
Pete Actipis: It has been pretty successful, and I think you can tell in the experience, right? Look, I'll take it when Reddit says positive things about Warzone! That is an anomaly and I'm excited by it. Like Etienne said, we recreated Verdansk to be the best experience possible. But then we didn't stop there. This is the starting point. It is not an anomaly for where Warzone is going.
We knew there was going to be a lot of new players or lapsed players, word of mouth of like, 'hey come check out Verdansk.' We added this Casual mode, which is doing really well for us. We wanted players to come in and re-experience it at their pace, or experience it for the first time in a safe way where they don't feel like they're getting sweated out or outplayed. We were very careful with crafting this experience this season, and the data is showing us that it's been really successful and we just hope to keep that momentum going into the future.
Etienne Pouliot: Yeah, it's really impressive how much Call of Duty touches different players from all different backgrounds. We've seen that during the pandemic and we've seen that today. So it's really a privilege to work on that level of successful franchise. We have that approach of, we want as many players as we can. So having that Casual mode, having more quality of life, having more ways to have a stable, performant game is really important. Down the rest of that chapter and so for the rest of Warzone, how can we be a place to welcome new players and make sure that if you were there back then you will return to what you love?
IGN: Casual mode is where I’m playing right now as a lapsed player returning to Warzone. However, I am starting to see the sweats maybe looking at Casual mode and going, ‘we can have some fun here.’ You can tell when you're playing it when someone shouldn't be there, this is too easy for you. Are you seeing that internally?
Pete Actipis: The whole spirit of the Casual mode was to give people that were scared about getting into a time commitment or a game commitment or a skill commitment with Warzone, but do it on their terms. The nice thing about this is, this is the first rev of it. It just went live and we're going to look at the data, we're going to evolve it over time to make sure it retains the design principles and spirit that we wanted it to have. So if we see sweats come in there wrecking the whole server, then we will have to come up with plans against that. It's still pretty new right now. I think it's still giving players what they need in it right now, and we'll just keep monitoring and involving it. But it's a fun mode. I can't lie - I enjoy playing it myself and I can play with people that never played Call of Duty before. It's a little less intimidating that way, and I think that's what makes it so appealing for myself.
Etienne Pouliot: And you get the sense of learning the tension of the game. It's not just you get thrown away and after that you go to the Gulag and that's it, it's done. Internally we have a lot of great players, and maybe we call them 'demon players.' It's funny to just have those discussions with them about the game and how they see it, how they approach it. And on my side, me I'm more on the downfall skill player - I was great before and now I'm just getting worse and worse. So I think it's really important to just have those conversations with those great players and see how we can tweak that experience in a way that everyone gets something out of it.
And I'm pretty sure that we have a lot of players who are going to get inside ranked down the road of BR. So I see that as a more broad, different mode to just engaging depending on your skillset.
IGN: Yeah, I guess when ranked starts, the sweats will probably gravitate towards that and they'll have had their fun. I want to talk to you about Call of Duty lore. I remember reporting on Warzone and how everything became unified and all the different brands became mashed together in a timeline. And I remember in 2021 you blew Verdansk up, and it was publicly said: ‘this is never coming back.’ And I believed it! So are we just supposed to go, ‘you know what, actually it doesn't really matter, it's about the fun.’ Or have you come up with a story explanation for how we're back?
Pete Actipis: I don't want to spoil any sort of narrative story bits. And that's not confirming nor denying either way. It's just, what we wanted to do for this moment was take a pause from any sort of timelines or anything like that and just say, 'look, let's just celebrate this moment in time and just have a great time with it.' If and when we introduce a narrative we may or may not figure out if we have to resolve this. But again, I'm not trying to spoil anything or say or mislead in any direction. But this season's launch was just, let's have a fun moment and go back to the nostalgic bits.
Etienne Pouliot: And I don't know if you've seen some clips around it, but all I can say is that there is stuff in the map that I'm pretty sure that players who know the map will definitely find some bits of information. And after that they can figure it out. But at the same time it's important to acknowledge some of the historical moments of five years of Warzone. So Verdansk is part of that five year celebration.
IGN: A lot of people are wondering, is Verdansk here to stay? Is it like a celebration, one-shot type thing that you're doing, or is this something that players can expect longer term and you iterate on it on that basis?
Pete Actipis: We brought Verdansk back for a reason. It wasn't just to bring it back for a season and kind of say goodbye to it again. A lot of effort went into it. So for the time being Verdansk is sticking around and this is just the beginning of the Verdansk 2025 journey, and then we'll see how things go from there. So again, no confirmation or anything on the strategy on the maps moving forward, but we love Verdansk. It was a nostalgic map that we loved and it's fun to play on, and so we just want to keep investing on it and continue to make it a better experience for our players moving forward for at least the time being.
IGN: I’ve seen players go back to unlock Price’s ghillie suit from Modern Warfare 2 now Verdansk is back. Have you seen this?
Etienne Pouliot: Yeah, I've seen that.
IGN: People are asking each other how to get it again, going back to Modern Warfare 2 or even buying it to unlock the ghillie suit.
Etienne Pouliot: It's really interesting how the community is engaging with the game. We have the chance of having all the different operators from Modern Warfare 2, Modern Warfare 3, and all the different games. It's something that I really love from the game, is that all the different battle passes and Blackcell, I can change every time my loadout and my operator. And sometimes I even use really, really old weapons that maybe are not meta, but I have the feeling that I'm back, I'm there the way I want to play. So I'm pretty sure a lot of people are just using all the different content we gave them across all those years and having fun right now.
Pete Actipis: On launch day I went back and picked an old Ghost costume that looked very similar to the launch trailer versions. I'm like, 'okay, I'm back in it too.' That's part of the fun, picking your operator and the look and trying to relive that moment as you remember it.
IGN: I’ve been having old debates again about whether to play aggressive or just camp on a rooftop and snipe, or just hide, in the same old places. When you were thinking about bringing back the map, did you consider tweaking it in such a way to encourage certain gameplay types or gameplay styles, or did you want to recreate it as accurately as possible so the same gameplay styles in the same places would happen once again?
Etienne Pouliot: We wanted to recreate those moments, but again, we've learned a lot. So just to give you a quick example: player visibility is really better right now than back then. Maybe people will remember Roze, but there were a lot of dark corners. That was an experience that a lot of people were not attracted by. So we've made slight adjustments like this to make sure it's fun for everyone.
And another thing is audio was really, really, really important for us. So just making sure that you understand from each corner where you're in this, where will be the enemy, and how you need to react. So again, just making sure that it's the best Verdansk version we will deliver. That was the goal and I think that we are on the right path to continue.
Pete Actipis: We also didn't want change too much because then it wouldn't be what you remembered in Verdansk. The map itself had a lot of that sandbox-y kind of like, 'do I want to play long range and go camp at the top of ATC Tower or the top of Stadium roof with a helicopter?' There was a lot of play potential, a lot of opportunities for close range, long range, you name it; great fighting in the woods areas north of Quarry, or south west of Hills.
To make that a reality we went back into the core experience and made sure we were able to pay those moments off. So we retuned the circle back the way it worked originally. So we allow these wild swings for these first and last circles so you can get more of these dynamic and crazy experiences where you're, the first part of the match you're playing in a dense area, maybe like Downtown, and then it ends somewhere where there's an opening, and you're like, ‘oh crap, I got to go hit my loadout again, let's go get some money so we can acquire a loadout so I can get more of a mid to long range weapon to be able to handle late game.’
And we also made vehicles more impactful, so we had to remove things like the redeploy drone beacons and all the other fast travel mechanics, to make the rotations a little bit more difficult, which made you think of, ‘how do I want to move with my team and what kind of weapons do I need to carry and what sort of equipment do I carry?’
All of those things might look like individual things, but they all compound together to really form the experience. And so we were very careful. It was like, ‘what's the experience that we really want to go after when we brought back Verdansk?’ So then that started peeling back the onion of, ‘okay, we have to change this, we should change this and this and this.’ And so all of it together as the sum of the parts of that beat that we were going after.
IGN: I wanted to get some insight into TTK (Time to Kill) and how you approached what you wanted to achieve there for Verdansk coming back. It feels shortened to me, but exactly what happened there, and why did you make the changes you made?
Pete Actipis: Comparatively to last year, the Urzikstan year, it is a faster TTK. It's pretty equivalent - I don't know the exact numbers offhand - but the original experience and what we wanted to go back for now was make it more of a casual, friendly kind of, ‘if I'm not good at hitting straight shots, I have an opportunity, I'm not going to get destroyed every gun battle.’ There's also a lot more excitement of like, ‘oh, I have an opportunity to get a kill.’
That being said, it is not like we're trying to remove skill from the game. There's still a lot of skill involved in this game, but it's approachable, which is the key difference there. And part of this was not only how do weapons handle, but then also how does your movement handle in response to that? Do I feel like I can engage in combat and get a bead on somebody and react to how someone's moving or get away from shots?
So movement and gunplay are very tied to the hip. And this is again the peeling onion approach. We like right now where the TTK sits. We will evaluate as the game progresses and see what our fans think. We're always evolving and we'll react appropriately based on that. But right now it seems like people are enjoying it. I know TTK is... some people either love it or they hate it. It depends on their player type. It's okay to be opinionated. That's cool! We're just trying to do what's best for the community at large.
IGN: My first Verdansk match back I was in the plane and there were four of us getting ready to jump out, and one of the players was a giant Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle and the other was this fairy thing. I was like, 'this is not how Warzone was back in lockdown.' Was that on your minds as you were thinking of rekindling the feeling exactly as it was back then, when some of these crazy skins weren't so prevalent in the game? Did you ever think at any point that actually, just for the relaunch, at least at the start, we're going to limit it to mil-sim [military simulation] stuff, or some of the stuff that people remembered? Or was that just never a consideration for you?
Pete Actipis: We talked about everything. We left no stone unturned really. But we wanted to create the best version of Verdansk possible. And part of that is just understanding the reality of where we're at. We're in a Black Ops 6 year. So at the end of the day we still are dealing with differences in loadouts and weaponry and even operators. We tried to pay homage and pay off the spirit of that nostalgic experience as best as possible. But our intent was never to be a facsimile of that old experience. It was supposed to be the best version of Verdansk and Warzone to date.
Part of that was respecting players’ purchases. As a player, I've invested X amount of time, money, whatever it is, and this is who I like to play with. Okay, we could have restricted weapons and operators, but then it creates this big friction moment for players who are like, 'I just want to play the game. I want to have fun in my mode.' I know some players might have more of a stance on it, like, ‘I want it to be pure mil-sim.’ But the spirit was to make it welcoming for all players.
Etienne Pouliot: I remember sometime with my friend, we were like, 'yeah, today we all buy a different turtle and we wanted to be the four turtles winning a match. It was pretty crazy. So I think just having those possibilities in front of the player.
Mil-sim - one of my friends is really hardcore, he plays only with one attachment. That's his rule. Because he feels that it's cheating. He's like, 'no, it's not a usable case of a weapon. So I will only use one.' And I'm like, ‘okay man, if you want to do it, but I will never go toward that path.’
So I think that just having all those different possibilities so you can engage the way you want. And after that, like Pete just mentioned, I think that it's really important for us to respect all the time and money you spend in the game and making sure it's still worth it for you.
IGN: Your friend must be very good at Call of Duty if they can get by with just one attachment.
Etienne Pouliot: Yeah, it's really incredible how many people I've seen through all the years that they have such a great skill that from my point of view I'm like, ‘hey, are you using something else that I'm not aware of?’ But yeah, you're a true player.
IGN: That does lead me on to one of the final questions I wanted to ask. Activision has increased communication around cheating in Warzone and made changes recently, like with crossplay. But are you seeing any improvements now with Verdansk coming back?
Pete Actipis: To be honest with you, that's not our area of expertise, the whole cheating side. I would defer those questions to the Ricochet team and how that stuff has been working out. Anecdotally, the games have been feeling good. I don't feel like I'm getting cheated on. I think that's even what our streamers are saying. But again, that's not really a data point.
Etienne Pouliot: And something just to add, it's just that it's always something on top of our mind. So we're just making sure that the right person speaks with the right team and makes sure that we put a lot of effort. Because everything we saw from the community, it's important for us too. So just making sure that yeah, we will put all the energy needed to prevail and making sure the game is at the right condition that we want.
IGN: Do you have any message to the community about your plans for Warzone in 2025 now that you've gotten to a place where there's positive sentiment? What can players expect?
Pete Actipis: First of all, thank you for either coming back or continuing with us on this Warzone journey. We are players too and we strive to make the game as good as possible. The launch of Verdansk, the simplification of our systems and our mechanics and just the flow, is the beginning. We're going to cultivate the game and we're pretty excited for our roadmap moving forward. We've got some great surprises that I'm not going to spoil today in store, but we hear the community and we want feedback. We listen. We take all opinions. We have our own, and we like hearing what the players think and feel. The passion is really important for us because that fuels us. We're excited to continue on with our journey here.
Etienne Pouliot: Yeah, totally. The first thing is just to thank all the players for all the love. And even the bad things. I think it's important to know both sides of the community. We're all passionate, and we have a lot of great ideas that are coming down the path. Warzone has so much room to continue to grow and opportunity in front of us. So I just hope that with all the different players we will get to those moments, and after that they will stick as memories for them for quite a long time.
Wesley is the UK News Editor for IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.
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