‘Warzone’ Is Completely Broken After ‘Squid Game’ Update

If you’re having trouble loading into a match of Warzone you’re not alone. Ever since the end of the Christmas event and the beginning of the Squid Game crossover event, the battle royale game has been in an awful state.

I tried to team up with two of my friends Monday afternoon to play the new Limited Time Squid Game mode. The first match, one of my friends froze on the loading screen. He had to force close his game and restart. The same thing happened to him when we tried again, so we tried to play a match on Rebirth Island. This time, both my friends were kicked from the party and I dropped in alone. So I backed out.

We tried again. This time, I got an error message: “our level fastfile is different from the server” popped up. I was kicked from the match, but not the party. Both my friends were able to get into the match, but dropped out so we could play together. We all restarted our games and loaded up again. My game froze trying to join the party. I force-closed it and tried again. We loaded into a match and every single one of us got stuck on the loading screen.

We gave up.

This was a solid 45 minutes. One of my friends had an XP token running. We had played one match of Black Ops 6 multiplayer before attempting Warzone. That’s all we were able to play before calling it, at this point totally disenchanted with the thought of playing Call Of Duty at all.

We are not alone. Perusing the Warzone subreddit, there are countless posts about these exact same issues over the past two days. Games not loading, players getting kicked, crashes, bugs. And this is all on top of the myriad concerns the player-base has been raising for ages now: Rampant cheating, especially in Ranked; constant desync issues; freezing, frame drops, bugs, connection issues. It’s a mess, and players are dropping, streamers are seeing fewer views on their Warzone and Black Ops 6 streams. The Steam player count for Black Ops 6 fell by 50% a month after launch. My own initial enthusiasm for the game has begun to dry up—but I’ll save my criticisms of Black Ops 6 for a separate post.

A few weeks ago I wrote a post that basically argued that it’s time to simplify Warzone. The general idea is simple:

• First, separate Warzone from the yearly Call Of Duty release cycle. Quit updating the game to fit all the changes that come to multiplayer. If anything, just swap out old guns with new guns each year, but even that might not be a great idea. At this point, there are simply too many guns in Warzone and the vast majority of them are no longer viable.
• Instead, focus on making Warzone the best game it can be. Keep polishing the gameplay, get back to basics and focus on anti-cheat, connection issues, ironing out bugs and getting the best performance possible out of the game. Instead of constantly adding new content, fix the problems the game has and make it the best shooter out there. The gameplay itself is fun. The gunplay is top-notch. But the myriad issues players face kill that fun in its tracks.
• What I’d really love to see is the return of Verdansk and a rollback to simpler game mechanics. I don’t hate omnimovement—I think it’s pretty fun in multiplayer, even though it gives controller players even more advantages over mouse-and-keyboard, and aim assist is already cranked to the max—but I don’t think Warzone benefits from omnimovement. I think “vaulting” some guns also makes sense, simply because any attempt to balance this many weapons is almost impossible and I’d rather have fewer choices in a well-balanced game than near-infinite choices between a lot of unviable guns.
• I know Activision is rolling out kernel-level anticheat, and I hope this is going to be a game-changer, because the cheating is absolutely out of control right now. In Ranked, this is a massive problem to the point where it’s not really any fun to play anymore. Loading into a match as a Gold-tier squad (or sometimes with friends who are still Bronze or Silver) we encounter tons of Crimson and even Iridescent players. Many of these are simply high-skilled players that make matches ridiculously hard, but many are also clearly cheating. Top this off with the connection and desync issues and you have a Ranked mode that is simply not any fun.
• Other issues: Urzikstan is a boring map with zero personality. The game really needed either a new map (Avalon) or Verdansk at launch. Urzikstan is flat and brown and dull. The points of interest are not interesting. Loot is difficult to pick up and often gets stuck in walls. The new Area 99 Resurgence map was fun at first but I won’t touch it because it’s just way too chaotic and sweaty (thank goodness for Rebirth Island but it’s an old map and all the other Resurgence maps are gone—I miss Vondel in particular but also Fortune’s Keep and even Ashika Island). The Gulag in BR hasn’t changed in ages and is objectively worse than many previous Gulags.

Then there is the monetization, which I think a large portion of the Call Of Duty community has really gotten fed up with. I like crossover events and it’s fun to have some holiday-themed Operator skins, but it’s gotten so far out of control at this point that the game is just ludicrous to look at. Like many others, I think it would be nice to have an option to turn off skins and only show default Operators so that anyone who wanted to have an experience closer to milsim would have that.

I did learn a neat trick, however: Turning off Gore and Dismemberment Effects in the settings turns off the crazy colorful, loud death animations and effects that make it seem as though every time you get killed by certain weapons you’re getting exploded or vaporized. I found that exceptionally distracting and now that it’s turned off, my quality of life in the game has certainly improved.

In any case, the game is a mess. If you can’t load into matches, or you can’t get your squad into matches without someone freezing, dropping or crashing, there’s really no point in playing. Hopefully a fix is incoming. But it’s like whack-a-mole. As soon as one problem is fixed, another pops up. It’s hard not to feel like we’ve simply been regressing ever since the game first launched in 2020. It sure would be nice if we were able to load up the original Warzone if only to play them side by side and see.

P.S. Not to be entirely negative, but the most fun I’ve had in Warzone in a long time was during Christmas break when the Santa’s Sleigh Resurgence mode was active. That mode was awesome and we got a ton of wins playing it. It’s really a shame that some version of this isn’t available all the time.

P.P.S. Also probably worthy of a separate post is the use of AI in Black Ops 6 and Warzone to create some assets, as well as the circumstances surrounding the recasting of some voice actors, replaced with uncredited voice actors, due to SAG-AFTRA union disputes. “We respect the personal choice of these performers,” an Activision spokesperson said of the recasting. “Out of respect for all parties, we won’t add new commentary about the ongoing negotiations with SAG-AFTRA. We look forward to a mutually beneficial outcome as soon as possible.”

YouTuber XclusiveAce has some good points in the below video as well:

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