Call of Duty: Warzone is back – Call of Duty: Black Ops 6

It is now time for Activision’s franchise managers to realize what we gamers have been trying to tell them for years: Warzone should be freed from the annual Call of Duty releases and the game should stay with Raven Software and not be tossed between studios that don’t seem to work together. Let Warzone exist as its own product, with its own identity, and let Raven stay in charge with the support of High Moon and Beenox.

Because after Treyarch canceled Warzone last November, it’s been five months and the game has lost 80% of its active, regular players. More than 80% according to multiple industry sources. In an effort to revive a dying Battle Royale game and try to lure back all the millions who left Warzone, stopped playing – Raven was put back in charge and Beenox (who made Al-Mazra and Vondel, two great maps) was given the task of upgrading Verdansk and beyond; more or less erasing all the changes made in November 2024.

It was clear, though not outright stated, in Activision’s own “patch notes” for yesterday’s big update that the idea was to almost completely remove Omnimovement, restore the loot system with floating objects/weapons and the ability to shoot 9mm cannon in the air, on the way to the ground (from the plane), upgrade the server farm at Demonware with machines operating at a higher ticrate than 10-20Hz and try to get rid of the frankly bizarre number of cheaters occupying Warzone at the end. Of course, it’s too early to say after one night whether or not they will succeed in luring back most of the lost players, but it’s no mean feat to conclude after four hours of play that Raven Software has done great things here – as has Beenox. Because after five months of hopeless design decisions and rotten in-game achievements, Call of Duty: Warzone feels like a working, fleshed-out game again. Just like it did in September 2024. Just like it did in May 2020.

Omnimovement has been almost completely removed, which is a very welcome improvement, and the movement now reminds me more of a mix between Modern Warfare III: Warzone and the 2020 game, the original. Gliding on the ground feels a bit different from all previous versions, as there seems to be a compressed, short little delay in the way your character performs his “glide,” which is fine, if you ask me. There was, in my humble opinion, a touch too much arcade smoothness in the way you moved in Warzone from 2019-2020, while Warzone 2.0 was arguably too heavy and slow for many players. Omnimovement and the way the game was experienced as of last November, however, is the worst game feel in Call of Duty: Warzone ever, and that this has been a priority for Raven to fix in recent months is not particularly hard to understand.

Furthermore, the graphics are back where they were last summer. The game looks great again. Infinity Ward’s absurdly deep asset library is now fully utilized again, the textures have high resolution (I’m playing on Playstation 5 Pro), the lighting is fantastic and the problems with character spacing with anti-aliasing and blurry visibility of the snotty Treyarch map Area 99 have been wiped out. The sound is great again, too. Incredibly better than it was in Black Ops 6: Warzone as of last November, when Activision decided to go back to the PS3 era in terms of audio and also took the opportunity to sell better in-game audio for real money in a game that didn’t work. This has all been fixed and I would say the acoustic and directional sound here is better than ever in Warzone.

What about Verdansk? Beenox has rebuilt the classic 2019 map in the new version of Infinity Ward’s internal game engine IW and has done a brilliant job here. They have refrained from making some changes to the architecture and texture (as was rumored last year) and instead stayed true to the extremely popular original, but updated models with more detail and texture work in general. Verdansk has never looked better, and it was obvious in game one just how good this Battle Royale monolith really is. After all, Infinity Ward originally created this classic map which, along with Al-Mazra, is the best thing Activision has ever done in terms of maps. I just hope Verdansk gets to stay forever and that Raven fixes a card selector feature and also reinserts Al-Mazra and Vondel.

After the first full night back in Verdansk, I say a silent prayer now that Treyarch can never stir the Warzone pot again, and that Activision now realizes that this game mechanics, this combination of game systems, this game feel and this version of Warzone is what people want to play. At least let Warzone live as its own product, not tied to the annual, numbered Call of Duty release, and with thoughtful, quirky updates to an already working game, rather than replacing things players like, just for the sake of it.