Warzone Was Originally Meant For 200 Players
Fewer frags but your hard drive takes a breather. According to the Infinity Ward developers, the team was initially eyeing a player size of 200 players for each match during the development stages of Warzone, increasing the number of players by a remarkable 50 players up from the current limit of 150 competitors joining the server.
In an interview with the Washington Post, the devs talked about the limitations that they faced, explaining that a larger player size would also necessitate a larger map. Given the already large size of Verdansk and the associated disk space that already runs the player of stand-alone Warzone more than 100GB, the team ultimately decided against it after much playtesting. "But at the end of the day ... there’s only so small a footprint you can get this content down to. And you get into this question of like, how many frickin’ gigabytes is this thing going to be" said Patrick Kelly, co-studio head of Infinity Ward to the Post.
With a 150, Warzone had already pushed the envelope on most other popular Battle Royales such as Fortnite and PlayerUnknown Battleground, which count on only 100-man-strong lobbies. Add to that the fidelity and required graphics of a Call of Duty adjacent game and you got yourself a real development challenge. The cross-platform FPS has not slowed down its growth with over 100 million players having created an account for the game.
Starting at 8 pm BST (9 pm CET) on April 21st, a new content update is set to roll out with the long-awaited event likely altering Verdansk further and moving it into the setting of the most recent Call of Duty, Black Ops Cold War, and thus back into the 80s. How this will change the map architecture is currently unknown and is only likely to be shown off on the morning of the 22nd at 5 am BST (6 am CET). Until then, players will be able to enjoy the event taking place around the map which had been hinted at in active play over the last couple of weeks, introducing zombies, launching missiles, and displaying warning messages on the player's screen.
Image via Infinity Ward