Activision has released Warzone Caldera map, but there's a catch

Warzone Caldera map has been released by Activision recently but you can't play it (Image via Activision)

Long after its removal from Call of Duty space, Warzone Caldera map has resurfaced in the public domain. However, don't get your hopes too high because you can't actually play it. Activision recently released Warzone Caldera map — but with a major twist — for academic and research purposes through open source data based on the fan-favorite and iconic battle royale map.

The giant map with 15 overall Points of Interest (POIs) was shut down in September 2023 after getting introduced in the Warzone Pacific update, back in 2021. This article will detail the reasons why this map was selected as part of the open set.

Warzone Caldera map has returned, but for a bigger purpose

Although the popular battle royale location has made a comeback, it's only to "benefit the Call of Duty community and positively impact the future of gaming" through an open data set.

Activision's Chief Technology Officer Natalya Tatarchuk and Senior Vice President, fellow Software Engineer Michael Vance, recently revealed through an official blog several key details and objectives behind revealing the open source data for Warzone Caldera map.

Warzone Caldera map is back but in the same way fans would expect. (Image via Activision)

When asked why only Caldera was chosen to release as part of the open set, Mr. Vance said that the team wanted to choose a map that "best represents the scale and complexity of our current design philosophy."

"It’s exciting for us to see Caldera continue to live on and help expand the games industry through academia and research. The hierarchical arrangement of the map also allows users to select sub-sections of the map to limit the scope of analysis or providing multiple smaller areas for comparison, which is useful in avoiding over-fitting issues by leaving other sections of the map for validation."

Warzone Caldera map's return also represents one of the largest production-validated open data set releases from the gaming industry when it comes to the complexity of geometry and instance counts.

A still from the open data set for Caldera map. (Image via Activision)

The overall geometry of Warzone Caldera map is approximately 4 GB; but it's composed of over 4 million meshes, 28 million primitives, and more than one-billion-point instances. The latter can also represent scene metadata such as volumes which are used for lighting processing.

Furthermore, it was revealed that the credit for Warzone Caldera map's richness goes to Raven Software, with assistance from Beenox, High Moon Studios, and several other Call of Duty development teams.

Activision's team further stated in the blog that Caldera's open data set will benefit the Call of Duty community in numerous ways going forward.

"Innovations that come from this data set release could give more freedom and flexibility for our content teams to find the most engaging scenarios for our players. Insights into object relationships, procedural approaches to our world data, and other ideas could lead to more compact data representations on both disk and in memory."

It will be intriguing to see what the academic community will eventually come up with from the map's open source data.

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Edited by Jito Tenson