First Look At The New Warzone Resurgence Map 'Fortune's Keep' Has Me Worried
Fortune's Keep...I gotta tip Activision cause I like the name of the map. The size, scale and buildings within the map are worrisome. Additionally, the rumors seem to be true that they're getting rid of Rebirth Island when Fortune's Keep is added into the game.
Here's how the map compares to Rebirth Island's scale:
According to JGod's scale, it looks to be close to double the size of Rebirth Island. I DON'T LIKE THAT! Rebirth Island's size felt perfect especially considering the amount of players within the map. My caveman instincts are telling me this - for this map to be considered a success like Rebirth Island, they'll have to up the player count. The mid-40 size player cap works extremely well on Rebirth. There's enough area for everyone to land and you're always close to potential engagements. It's quite literally the exact opposite of Caldera or Storm Point for my Apex Legends players out there (do you guys even read Warzone blogs?).
Additionally, I'm not thrilled with how many different buildings are on the map.
Look at POIs like Town or Keep - it's building central. The more indoor areas there are in Warzone, the more ratty players tend to play. Think about the difference between dropping Downtown or Boneyard on Verdansk. You'll meet two wildly different type of players. In general, more buildings = more campers.
Now if I look at Rebirth Island under this same lens, the same could be said:
Rebirth Island always did a great job of incorporating buildings and cover, but reducing camping at the same time. When I see a multitude of houses in close proximity like Keep or Town, that's where it'll be campy. Now here's the biggest kicker, we truly won't know how people like to play Fortune's Keep until we are boots on the ground in the new map.
To kick off any new Battle Royale map, players will always be more tentative to play aggressive because they aren't as familiar with the map. So we'll have to give it a few weeks to really understand the play style.
To throw in another Apex Legends comparison, Apex does a phenomenal job of rotating their maps. Every 60-odd days, the ranked map gets rotated out which keeps the game feeling fresh. Granted some maps are better than others (Yes, I'm looking at you third-party central, King's Canyon), but it continues to keep the player base engaged. I wish Warzone was able to do this with their Resurgence maps. Every month or two months, we rotate the maps to keep it fresh and fun. Unfortunately for gamers, that would most likely result in Warzone having a download size of 2 TB and update times of 12+ hours. So, I don't know if we'll ever have that dream come true.
In closing, I'll fucking miss Rebirth Island. Alcatraz feels so tied to the Call of Duty scene ever since it was first introduced as a Zombie Map called "Mob of the Dead." It's widely enjoyed by the community, so it'll be a tough day to watch it go. I'm praying to the CoD gods above for Fortune's Keep to be a banger. Only time will tell!
In order to honor the GOAT of Rebirth Island, merch team mocked up these designs below:
You can get yours down below!
If you wanna enjoy Rebirth Island while it's still around, hop in on stream tonight for Stoolie Night! I'll be pulling viewers right from chat.
My AMP63 Loadout
My NZ-41 Loadout