Call of Duty: Warzone going offline for 24 hours ahead of surprise early launch for season 3, Verdansk

Surprise! Call of Duty: Warzone’s highly anticipated return of OG map Verdansk will now launch one full day early, now coming on April 2.

There’s one caveat to the news that was announced on a new episode of the COD POD, however, and it’s that Warzone will go completely offline for 24 hours after the season’s launch before Verdansk returns. This means the game will likely be unavailable starting in the afternoon US time on April 2 before coming back at around noon ET on April 3. Black Ops 6 will not go offline, though.

But that’s not all that was announced on the podcast today. Classic Warzone launch weapons from 2020 are coming back, including the CR-56 AMAX and Kilo 141 assault rifles, the HDR sniper rifle, and kali sticks melee weapon. And anyone who opens the Warzone tab during downtime will get access to the Kilo for free. Not bad.

There will also be updates to movement and pacing in Warzone, including “a version of omnimovement that’s been specifically tuned just for Warzone” that’s closer to the game’s original movement. Basically, Activision is continuing to roll back a number of controversial changes it made to the battle royale since 2021.

This includes classic vehicles coming back and the removal of redeploy balloons as a way to move around the map. Handling and damage on vehicles has been “completely rebalanced,” including “vehicle control and maneuverability” returning to how it all felt back in 2020 as well.

Activision really is seemingly trying hard to re-capture the pandemic-era Warzone experience, hopefully without all of the respiratory disease and loneliness, but now with a number of quality-of-life updates included as well, such as powerful default loadouts including new guns. Whether the list of updates will mitigate the cheating and hacking issues the game has been plagued with for years is another story entirely.

Season three of Black Ops 6 drops on April 2, including a new Zombies map called Shattered Veil, new multiplayer maps, operators, a battle pass, and a lot more.