Call of Duty Developer Explains What Went Wrong With Warzone’s Busted Season 1 Reloaded Update

The main developer of Call of Duty Warzone has explained what went wrong with this week’s Season 1 Reloaded update, and issued an apology to players.

Following the mid-season update’s release, players ran into intense visual and gameplay glitches that made the battle royale pretty much unplayable. The problems were so bad that Raven had to pull the Champion’s Quest feature, which tasks players with winning five Warzone matches in a row or 30 total in the season.

Activision developers worked through the night to get on top of the problems, issuing a raft of issues that look to have sorted Warzone out for the most part. Champion’s Quest has now returned, and players have already managed to complete it.

Now, Raven Software has tweeted to explain what went wrong, saying parts of an upcoming, in-development feature accidentally went live, causing the bugs

Here’s the statement in full:

“We wanted to address the issues that players encountered during the Season 1 Reloaded launch period.

“We’ve been laying the groundwork for the return of some fan favorite features in upcoming seasons, which has required a degree of preemptive setup in our live environment.

“Yesterday’s update shipped with some of that work, and we unfortunately encountered a conflict between live player data and our servers. Our teams were made immediately aware of the issues and began investigating shortly after the update went live. We rallied studio teams from around the world to get these issues resolved as swiftly as possible.

“We – as devs – love this game and apologize for the disruption that resulted from these events. Please know that we hold ourselves to a high standard and yesterday’s issues did not align with that.

“With that said, we’re also very excited for what’s ahead and look forward to bringing the best we can to #Warzone!”

Raven followed that tweet up with another, teasing one of the in-development, upcoming features for Warzone (the fan-favourite Specialist Perk bonus is coming to Warzone):

So anyway, what are some of the features we’re preparing for well ahead of time – you ask? 👀 pic.twitter.com/WhFYyCUE6P

— Raven Software (@RavenSoftware) January 19, 2024

The Specialist Perk was an ultra powerful and rare Perk from the original Warzone that activated the other perks in the game all at once. Given this teaser image shows the Specialist Perk on Rebirth Island, perhaps players will have to wait for the map to come out before its introduction later this year.

There’s a lot going on in the world of Call of Duty, with Season 1 Reloaded also refreshing Modern Warfare 3 with Ranked Play. Meanwhile, Call of Duty’s anti-cheat tech was updated so that it crashes the game if it detects a mouse and keyboard player using unauthorised tools to enable aim assist. There’s even a hint at an upcoming Warhammer 40,000 collaboration.

Wesley is the UK News Editor for IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.