"The biggest issue has been technical performance": Dev explains why a map rotation model is not a thing in Warzone

Call of Duty Warzone is currently in one of its worst states, with the player base dropping steeply with every new season. There are multiple bugs and glitches in the game and the community has not shown the same love for the Caldera map as they did with Verdansk.

Raven Software seems to be trying hard to hold it all together, but there is rarely a good span of time where players can enjoy the battle royale without any issues breaking the game.

One of the biggest issues with Warzone over the years has been its size. The game is currently crossing the 200 GB threshold on PC and close to 100 GB on consoles (PlayStation and Xbox). These sizes are a matter of concern for the community and many players have left the scene to enjoy other battle royale titles that do not demand much of their hard drives.

Ex-pro player and content creator Tyler TeeP recently interviewed a Raven Software dev on issues pertaining to the free-to-play title, and some great insights could be found from the conversation.

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Warzone dev explains why Caldera and Warzone cannot rotate in a map pool in the current stage of the game

Tyler TeeP interviewed Call of Duty live operations lead Josh Bridge, on the eve of the launch of the Season 2 Reloaded update in the free-to-play title. They spoke about a ton of issues in the game and how Activision is teaming up with the various studios to deliver a better-performing title than it currently is.

In light of a question from TeeP about map rotation in the game, Josh spoke at length about the impracticality of having a map pool to rotate on a periodic basis.

"We want that. We all want that. There's a technical problem. The install and reinstall sizes are f**king crazy. If we pulled out Caldera and dropped in Verdansk, this could be like essentially re-downloading. Every time we have done that, we lose players."

He also addressed the fact that players cannot fit anything else on an entry-level PS4 if they have Modern Warfare 2019 and Warzone loaded on it. There are external factors like the lesser availability of new-gen consoles, and the space crunch also adds to the difficulty of keeping a 100 plus gig game loaded all the time.

Josh Bridge also spoke about the reason behind Verdansk being so full of bugs and glitches that make the gaming experience terrible for the community.

"Verdansk was never authored with the idea that 180 weapons were going to be added to it. [...] It was never authored with that (kind of) memory space in mind and we did everything we could do like cloud-based asynchronous loading and streaming, [...] and all we could do to mitigate it, but we kept running into problems."

Bringing Verdansk back into the game now seems a lot more tedious for Raven Software and, in turn, for the entire community who would have to re-download it all on the day of the update. However, it seems like the devs are aware of the problems with the title, and it could be a matter of hope for the community in the near future.