In recent months, it’s felt like Warzone has been in a bit of a downturn, but in just a few days time, expect that trend to reverse – Verdansk is back, and the battle royale’s developers are pulling out all the stops for the map’s triumphant return. The iconic battleground has been faithfully remade, and as you’ll see from the Warzone Season 3 patch notes, the desire to recreate the original Verdansk experience extends to gameplay as well. The new update is full of tweaks and changes that’ll make it feel like 2020 all over again.
Warzone has evolved considerably from the Verdansk era. Even though it dropped the ‘2,’ this is the second iteration of the free PC game. Dozens of major new features and quality of life improvements have been made during this time. The integration with Black Ops 6 last year introduced the extremely dynamic Omnimovement system. The lineup of weapons and perks is totally different. However, as Epic Games recently demonstrated with its own throwback experience, Fortnite OG, if you’re going to dish out a nostalgia hit, you’ve got to do it properly.
Raven Software has already detailed some of the top-line additions and changes coming to Warzone to help replicate those glory days of Verdansk, including fan-favorite weapons like the Kilo and the HDR, and the return of some old contract variants. However, today’s Season 3 patch notes show that things are going even deeper.
Movement is the big standout for me. Raven said last week it would be tweaking Omnimovement to make it a little more like the original Warzone experience, and now we know exactly what that’ll look like. My eyes are particularly drawn to the increase in crouch-to-stand speed, which’ll make it easier to pop up over cover to lay down fire, and a 40% reduction in the cooldown time for jumping, which suggests to me that bunny-hopping is somewhat back.
Back in the Verdansk days, the Heartbeat Sensor used to be an unlimited-use piece of tactical equipment. These days it’s a field upgrade that needs time to charge up and only has around a minute of use once triggered. To make it a more powerful loadout option once more, Raven has buffed its usage time to two minutes now.
Elsewhere, Gulag Tokens and Revive Tokens are out to replicate the original experience. You’ve got one chance at winning your Gulag 1v1, or else your team has to buy you back in. The cost of buying your best Warzone loadouts from Buy Stations has also been reduced, and will cost $6,000 just like in 2020.
However, I do wonder if Raven has gone a bit too far with this change. Air Strike scorestreaks used to be an absolute nightmare to deal with in the first iteration of Warzone – they were powerful, hard to predict, and warning messages were often bugged, leading to plenty of occasions where you felt you were unfairly eliminated by them. To combat this, markers showing where missiles would land were added to players’ minimaps last year. However, for Verdansk’s return, this major quality of life change is being rolled back. Raven says it’ll “monitor feedback, data and sentiment on this as we look to the weeks ahead,” which suggests to me it’s already unsure if this is a good idea. I’m all for trying to replicate the Verdansk experience accurately, but bringing back something that players were vocally frustrated by is… a choice.
Regardless, the vast majority of changes (you can see them all in the full patch notes here) are exciting and meaningful ones. I suspect that folks who only started playing Warzone within the last couple of years might become a bit irritated by the wide array of gameplay changes, but for old hats like me who were there for the good ol’ days, it’ll just feel like second nature. Hopefully, anyway. My K/D after a week of Verdansk grinding may say otherwise.
As a reminder, Verdansk goes live in Call of Duty Warzone on Thursday, April 3. Season 3 actually begins a day earlier on April 2 in Black Ops 6, so you’ll be able to unlock new guns like the Kilo and start levelling them up in multiplayer ahead of your first drop back into Verdansk.
For more, check out our guides to the best battle royale games and best FPS games.
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