Call of Duty: Warzone – Area 99 map preview — Gotta go fast

If there was one thing I wasn’t expecting at Call of Duty: NEXT, it was more Warzone. We all knew something was coming eventually, but by all accounts, it could’ve been early 2025 before Warzone got any sort of refresh. Thankfully, Raven and Sledgehammer have been cooking behind the scenes. After playing the new Warzone map and experiencing the changes in gameplay, they have indeed cooked.

Resurgence is my preferred mode of play in Warzone. I like being able to run in without as much worry if I die, and Resurgence allows for a respawn window if I don’t make the right decision in my opening gunfights. It’s not a total freebie, but it’s a nice benefit.

Area 99 is the incoming map, arriving alongside Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 mechanical and gameplay integrations as of Season 1. There is a lot going on in the latter side of this, and while I’ll certainly go over what I noticed, there are things I’ll miss with the limited play time at Call of Duty: NEXT. I can tell you this: everything looks tremendous and this should be a great refresh that will energize the player base.

The new map is the central piece of the Warzone puzzle, and I love the lore behind it. Area 99 is a secret facility where the elements of the Nuketown map were manufactured, built in the 1950s and operational until the 1960s. Something happened, and hopefully we’ll have some sort of cutscene or in-game storytelling that will lead to the bottom of it. At any rate, the choice of Nuketown’s origins for this map is outstanding.

That connection extends to more than just naming a map we all know and (sometimes) love. Area 99 is the smallest Warzone map yet, clocking in smaller than even Rebirth Island. Raven has crafted it this way intentionally, meaning for you to get into more engagements faster, just like the map it’s all based on.

Once on the map, everything seems compact, with little space in between buildings. There’s also a lot of verticality, so you’ll want to make sure you’re looking up. The blend of POIs is really neat, with a mannequin factory on one side and a crane-suspended Nuketown house on the other. A lot of thought has gone into the locations, and even if the browns and grays are still a bit overdone (as they are in a lot of military-themed maps), there’s enough color here to give it life.

Moving around the map via omnimovement is fun, even if I haven’t still had the change click in my head in Warzone. There are a few scrapes I’ve managed to escape due to it, and it’s also given me a boost in terms of aggression. Depending on my lobbies, I could see my personal skill level going up just because of it. With the verticality of this map, I don’t see slower players at a disadvantage either, because you’ll have to figure out how to get to them. All of this makes for an even playing field, which allows the best players to emerge as they figure out the map and movement.

Weaponry is important, and while I love how the Black Ops 6 guns play in Warzone, I’m very intrigued as to the balancing once MWII and III weapons are added. Thankfully, with the new unified engine, this will be easier than it was during Cold War, where Raven had to recreate each weapon and adjust them. That said, I imagine BO6 weapons will be the most powerful.

As small as the map was, I didn’t get the feeling anything was overpowered. Long range wasn’t easy even while running with the best assault rifles or a good sniper rifle. Up close and personal seems to be the key, as my best games were running in with a submachine gun and causing chaos. I get the feeling that’s intentional, and is quite representative of the Nuketown philosophy behind the new map.

A change that is beneficial to whatever meta emerges is the removal of backpacks. That’s right, no more carrying three precision airstrikes or five bajillion armor plates. Less is truly more, pressing players to actually engage with each other as opposed to forcing them into your position. There are a few nice upgrades on the map, like armor and ammo satchels that raise the amount of those you can carry, but this brings us back to the old days of playing Warzone, which is exciting as it will lead to higher skill levels coming through.

Perks is another area that has changed. As of current Warzone, you pull a bunch in via loadouts or pick up packages of them. While you’ll still have loadout perks, now there’s no more swapping them for a different package. There are perks littered throughout the map you can scavenge to gain more than the initial three, so you’ll want to loot the heck out of the POIs or hope you fight someone with good perks to grab. This presses you into moving through the map rather than simply grabbing your loadout and sitting in one location. Some perks have changed as well, like Alertness being a combination of High Alert and Combat Scout. It’s not a huge overhaul, but since the team plans to rotate some perks out over time, it could create intriguing metas.

While I didn’t get to play nearly as much as I wanted to, my desire to play Warzone has intensified. Area 99 is a lot of fun to drop on, and the tweaks and integrations Treyarch and Raven are making to the formula look like they’ll make things frenetic, which is how Warzone should be. All of the cool Warzone changes you’ve heard about and watched here will be in the game come Season 1 of Call of Duty: Black Ops 6. Oh, and a little known map called Verdansk is back in Spring 2025, maybe you’ve heard of it?

See below for our list of partners and affiliates: