Activision is delaying Call of Duty: Warzone’s next season by a few weeks to focus on fixing bugs. The publisher announced in a blog post today that Vanguard and Warzone Pacific season 2 launch has been pushed from February 2 to February 14—a lovely day for a Warzone update.
“We feel your frustrations and hear you loud and clear. To date, we’ve deployed a number of updates, but more needs to be done,” the post reads. Warzone has been in a rough spot since the launch of its new Caldera map and addition of Vanguard guns in December. Especially on consoles, the game has suffered performance issues that weren’t present on the old map.
Warzone’s official Trello page is tracking some of the weirdest issues popping up, including a crash that can occur on Xbox if you press the home button too much and certain operator skins that turn players invisible at long distances.
Warzone is no stranger to persistent bugs, but this is the first time a planned update has been postponed because of them. “We will use this additional development time to deliver updates, including optimizations to gameplay, game balancing (including weapon and equipment balancing), to fix game stability and bugs, and to ensure an overall level of polish to improve the experience for players across Vanguard, Warzone Pacific, Black Ops Cold War, and Modern Warfare.”
It’s not unreasonable to think the delay could have something to do with the ongoing strike at Warzone developer Raven Software, which laid off a third of its quality assurance team (the folks that check for bugs before updates roll out) just a few days after the launch of Warzone Pacific season 1. As Warzone’s immediate future is dim, Call of Duty is about to have new masters. Yesterday, Microsoft announced that it will acquire the entirety of Activision Blizzard for $68.7 billion.
