Typically, when gaming companies issue a mid-season update with new content, the experience improves and gamers are happy. Then there’s Call of Duty, which issued their Season 1 Reloaded update yesterday and literally broke their own game to the point where they had to completely disable the vast majority of the update and postpone parts of it to a later day. Long-time Call of Duty fans would call this a “normal” update, just as Isaac “Icedad” Hamilton did in his Discord server. By the way, congrats on the new child, you animal, but I digress.
Call of Duty has a long history of breaking more than they fix. It’s typical for them to put out a new update and have things go awry, but this one was more broken than usual. It was also problematic before it broke, but we’ll get to that. Things shouldn’t get as bad as they did yesterday following an update, and that includes posting the wrong events. Yeah, they said there was going to be one The Boys event and we ended up getting a completely different event and the rewards are completely different. Who knows if it’s because the intended event was as broken as the rest of the update?
Yesterday’s update was broken it froze the game in menus; broke the game if you grabbed your loadout in Warzone; didn’t have the much-anticipated Ranked Play mode promised with the update; had no new content, and the servers were under so much pressure yesterday that it was dropping people left and right. I didn’t even get to some of the in-game problems that gamers were experiencing. How a company with as many resources, employees and studios available to it can have an update this bad is just beyond me.
What I’m left to assume is that this update just got lost in the sauce of the initial fixes, the transfer of the company to Microsoft, and the ousting of long-time President Bobby Kotick. Thank god that penis cancer in human form is gone from the company and I hope to never see his face in gaming again. Threatening to have an employee killed and stealing breast milk from new mothers are things I will never forgive.
Microsoft has a problem on its hands now and given that it just took over the largest game in the world and not everyone was happy about them having this much power, they could build a lot of goodwill by getting out in front of this and making it up to consumers. I don’t know how you do that, but if anyone can afford to do it, Microsft is one such company. Maybe a free bundle or a really cool event camo with a lower XP requirement would do the trick, but they need to do something.
Getting back to The Boys event I mentioned earlier, it was supposed to be a different event with a blueprint gun as the final reward. Now the event is substantially smaller and the final reward is an ugly camo that says “The Boys” on it, hard pass for me. Even the update to Modern Warfare Zombies, if you could even call it an update, was a pointless human boss with drones. Yeah, a human boss with a ton of bomb drones is the newest addition to Zombies. Make it make sense.
Whatever Call of Duty decides to do going forward, they really need to find a way to actually update the games that people playing. Zombies should have zombie bosses and content added to it. Zombie bundles should have zombie-related skins and vibes, not a mil-spec sim with a couple of Rare Tools added to the bundle. This is low-effort, highly unrelated crap designed to make money and while we know Call of Duty is also designed to do that, it was originally designed to honor fans and its legacy. They seem to have forgotten the last part.
