Call of Duty: Warzone Developer Opens Up About Verdansk’s Comeback and Player Responses

Call of Duty developer Pete Actipis, who is the game director on CoD: Warzone at Raven Software, has teased Activision’s plans for the OG map, Verdansk, which just recently returned to the game.

As many may recall, Warzone’s original battle royale map was featured in the game from launch in March 2020 to December 2021. It was gone for years until its return earlier this month. Actipis told IGN that Activision “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,” Actipis said. “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.”

Actipis declined to get into specifics on Activision’s plans and strategy for Warzone map rotation, but the developer did tease, “We love Verdansk.”

Actipis added: “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.”

Verdansk’s return to Warzone helped the game’s player populations grow on Steam. Actipis said the return of Verdansk has been “pretty successful” so far. Actipis pointed to Warzone having positive sentiment on Reddit as an example of how the company has turned things around to a degree at least.

“Look, I’ll take it when Reddit says positive things about Warzone! That is an anomaly and I’m excited by it,” Actipis 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.”

Beyond Warzone, a new Call of Duty game is expected to release in 2025, and it could be a Black Ops 2 sequel. It’ll face stiff competition in the market, as Rockstar’s Grand Theft Auto 6 is coming this fall. For context, Black Ops 6 was 2024’s best-selling game in the US.