Call of Duty: Warzone streamer Swagg was comparing Verdansk to Pacific’s Caldera when he realized that the gunfights felt different. After examining the differences, he decided why Verdansk may have taken more skill.
While much of the mechanics are the same, Caldera does feel different than Verdansk. And it’s not just because of the tropical environment and overhead planes, either.
One of Warzone’s most relentless grinders, FaZe Clan’s Swagg, contrasted the maps while watching world-record Caldera gameplay. During a gunfight he noted that, for some reason, fighting on Verdansk felt particularly “skillful” compared to the new map.
As Swagg then explained, that reason might be just how open Caldera’s environments are – compared with the crowded infrastructure of the earlier map.
Swagg explains why Warzone used to take more ‘skill’
(For mobile users, segment begins at 4:56)
First things first, Swagg thinks “Caldera is a good map” and he enjoys playing in the new Pacific hellscape. But the overriding contrast he noticed comes in the map’s design: “The difference between Caldera and Verdansk is just the verticality of the fights.”
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“You got so many different fights in Verdansk … so many situations with different types of gunfights … In Caldera it’s kind of all the same fights, since everything’s in a field, kind of open-ish, you get kind of the same kind of fights. In Verdansk, there was always so many different buildings and openings.”
As someone going for high-kill games, it’s no surprise that Swagg honed in on the fighting element of each territory – explaining why their battles feel so distinct.
As a final note on the topic, Swagg said it felt like you had to “be skillful to fight in some of these areas” in Verdansk. In essence, this alludes to the fact that dealing with varied gunfights takes more skill than fighting a similar fight each time.
While it’s true that Caldera does seem to have more open space and less verticality than its predecessor, its gunfights could also evolve as players get more comfortable on the map. It will be interesting to see if gamers can discover new openings and structures in the Pacific.
Most interestingly, though, one has to wonder if the developers can create new verticality and diversity in their new map with in-game events. Something like a volcano erupting would certainly mix things up.