Like many of the battlegrounds in Call of Duty, Verdansk isn’t officially situated in any real country.
Despite plotlines that have often stretched credulity, the Modern Warfare games set an expectation for serious geopolitics in places people recognise.
Verdansk, by contrast, is built to look like the kind of place machine gun fire wouldn’t seem out of the ordinary.
The Modern Warfare campaign’s attack on Piccadilly Circus is treated as a shock, a prompt for renewed retaliation against enemies of Western democracy.