To hype up this Battle of Verdansk event, Sledgehammer Games has released a map as a teaser. We don’t mean a game map for you to play on - that comes later. We mean an image of an actual map used for navigation, or in this case, the drawing up of battle plans and strategies. This teaser gives us an idea of what the fictional former-Soviet city looked like during the battles fought in World War II. Warzone has seen integration with Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War, as the standalone game’s immense success gave it a lease of life that outpaced the one-year spans in the spotlight afforded by main releases due to the series’ annual release schedule. This started with the addition of a new map and all of Cold War’s weapons and operators, and culminated in a massive nuke event reshaping Verdansk itself to be on-par with the 80’s setting. Since the Vanguard reveal will be an in-game live event, it almost seems like this will be comparable to the previous nuke event - even though Vanguard hasn’t even launched yet. Between the #BattleofVerdansk hashtags used to promote the reveal and now this teaser of a battle map from World War 2, it almost seems like Activision is gearing up to reformat Verdansk into its WW2 version already. This would be unprecedented and rather unusual - leading with a map change in Warzone for a new game not set to launch until November could be called jumping the gun. At the same time, it would also make sense, since Warzone is hugely popular with a large player base which it owes to the free to play model. If all these players would spend the next few months playing in a WW2 environment, they’d be all the more motivated to pre-order or buy Vanguard itself. That said, the initial Vanguard leaks themselves were attributed to promotional assets being datamined from Warzone game files - if tomorrow’s reveal event would have actually included a whole new map, that would definitely have been leaked by dataminers as well. We’re guessing that the in-game event will give attending players a brief glimpse at what the WW2 version of the Warzone map will look like later on. What little has been officially revealed about the Battle of Verdansk event does show that there will be some specific objectives to be completed - a special superweapon of unknown origin is going to appear in Verdansk during the event, which players will need to find and disable. Participating in this live event will grant players exclusive items as souvenirs that won’t be available any other way. We need not wait long to find out exactly what will happen - the Battle of Verdansk will reveal Call of Duty: Vanguard tomorrow.
