Call of Duty is ditching Modern Warfare 2 for Modern Warfare 3 and it’s ditching Al Mazrah for the new Warzone map Urzikstan – if you can believe it. Yes, you’re reading that right; Warzone map Al Mazrah is leaving when MW3 integrates with the battle royale experience – which means Al Mazrah is being dropped just over a year after release.
For a long time now, it’s been quite hard to call Warzone one of the best battle royale games out there. However, throughout Al Mazrah’s lifetime, things have been changing and Call of Duty aims to bring everyone back to the glory days of the game’s first few months with the new Warzone map Urzikstan. While exciting, though, that does mean that Al Mazrah is on the chopping block – something that was unclear until now.
During Call of Duty Next, after talking about the new Modern Warfare 3 weapons, Raven Software’s Ted Timmins has been talking about Warzone. During this, content creator ‘CharlieIntel‘ confirms that Warzone will have three maps at launch: Vondel, Ashika Island, and Urzikstan – the new big one. This means you’ll be able to play Resurgence at launch, which is great, but also means that Al Mazrah is gone – maybe for good.
You can check out the new map below – it certainly looks busier than Al Mazrah.
Timmins also shares that Urzikstan is going to be a little smaller than Al Mazrah, but that isn’t a bad thing. As you can see from early gameplay footage and the map layout itself, this is going to be a dense map – not too dissimilar to Verdansk – and you’re going to find yourself set upon by enemy squads quite quickly.
You can find some gameplay around two hours into the Call of Duty Next stream below:
When is this map leaving? Well, we don’t know just yet. It could be dropped when the Modern Warfare 3 release date arrives. However, based on previous map changes, it seems much more likely that it will leave when Modern Warfare 3 Season 1 starts. That means Al Mazrah will have been available for 384 days – which, is maybe long enough.
If you want to prepare yourself even more for the future of Warzone, you can check out the latest on how the new Modern Warfare 3 gear system looks designed to give you overpowered loadouts – something the two experiences seem to share – and why casual Call of Duty players might miss out on this unqiue gunsmith feature right here.