Call of Duty Warzone: Is the New Caldera Map Smaller Than Verdansk?

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The Warzone team has finally revealed the new Caldera map that will launch alongside the battle royale’s upcoming Pacific update, and some fans are already worried that it is smaller than the original Verdansk map.

I highly recommend checking out this extensive new blog post that includes quite a few new details regarding the map’s major locations and general layout (as well as some new information about the update itself), but here’s a basic overview of the new map that will certainly serve as a handy point of reference for the rest of this article.

For comparison’s sake, here’s a picture of Warzone‘s original Verdansk map (which will be rotating out of the game once this Pacific update hits).

While those are obviously two different styles of photos, pretty much every official photo of the Caldera map that has been released thus far and every photo of the Verdansk map that currently exists (as well as players’ experiences exploring that map) has led a lot of Warzone fans to believe that the new Caldera map is actually smaller than Verdansk.

It’s honestly easy to see why people would jump to that conclusion. Even if you ignore the Verdansk photos that make the surrounding mountain areas look like they’re a playable part of the map and just focus on the in-bounds zone, you can kind of see why some people think that the Verdansk map seems to be bigger at a glance. Maybe it’s the number of buildings on the Verdansk map or maybe it’s the layout or angle of the overview shots, but there at least seems to be something to the idea that Caldera isn’t notably larger than Verdansk and might actually be technically smaller.

Actually, that’s part of the “problem” here. When images of the Caldera map first started to leak, fans felt like it was almost certainly going to be significantly larger than the Verdansk map. However, the official reveal of the Caldera map (as well as some previously teased/leaked photos of the map’s layout) has led some of those same fans to believe that it may have been shrunken sometime during the course of development.

While there is no official word regarding whether or not Caldera’s size was reduced sometime during development (it honestly feels like those leaked photos and teases may have just been inaccurate or misinterpreted), fans have started to try to figure out whether or not Caldera is actually smaller than Verdansk using measurements and what little official information is available, and the early results suggest that worries regarding its smaller size may be largely unfounded.

While we don’t know the official size of the Caldera map, we do know that the playable area of the Verdansk map is exactly 9 km² large (at least according to the Warzone team). Some fans have tried to use the scale marker found at the bottom of the Caldera map image to figure out how it measures up compared to Verdansk’s official dimensions, and, while the exact findings tend to differ slightly, the consensus seems to be that Caldera is either slightly larger or slightly smaller than Verdansk. Generally speaking, though, most unofficial measurements revealed so far leave us with the conclusion that Caldera is roughly the same size as Verdansk. At the very least, it really doesn’t seem like the map is significantly smaller or larger than Verdansk even if it does lean towards one extreme or the other.

As other fans are quick to point out, though, the size of the new map might be less important than its layout. So far as that goes, it really does seem like there are fewer tall buildings on the Caldera map than on the Verdansk map, which could mean that there will be fewer opportunities for snipers to really hold an area and force players to scale large buildings in order to reach them. It also feels like Caldera is going to emphasize fighting in the open spaces between buildings and points of interest more than Verdansk did, but that remains to be seen.

So while we’ll all get a little better feel for how Caldera plays when Warzone‘s Pacific update finally drops on December 8th, every reasonable piece of evidence we’ve seen so far leads us to the significantly less dramatic conclusion that Caldera and Verdansk are, size-wise, roughly the same.