On April 12, Call of Duty received its biggest multiplayer update since the release of Modern Warfare 2 and Warzone 2 with the launch of Season 3.The new season added a pile of new maps, guns, modes, and features—as well as adding one fairly significant bug.
Since the update, players with AMD Vega GPUs have been experiencing immediate crashes on booting both Modern Warfare 2 and Warzone 2, accompanied by a “DirectX encountered an unrecoverable error” message. It’s also affecting players with Vega-based hardware, like the Radeon VII and pretty much every integrated GPU on a Ryzen processor.
After several days of complaints, including a thread on the Steam forums (opens in new tab) that now has over 1,000 replies, Beenox—the Canadian studio at Activision Blizzard responsible for handling the PC versions of Call of Duty—acknowledged the issue on Twitter (opens in new tab). “We’re investigating a crash on boot affecting AMD VEGA users on WZ2 and MWII”, they wrote. “The team is actively working to get it fixed.”
That was April 17, and players are still waiting for a fix. Some of them are getting desperate, starting a petition on change.org (opens in new tab) that demands, “It has been 2 weeks since most players have been able to play this game and either Activision takes action and resolves this issue or we should be eligible for a refund.” Another player took the unusual measure of having a cheese pizza delivered to Beenox’s office in Quebec (opens in new tab) with the message “Help Vega Please” written on the box.
Based on the proof-of-delivery photo showing the pizza box sitting on what looks like a waiting-room bench, I suspect that pizza never made it to the developers. Meanwhile, the return of the relatively chill Plunder mode to Warzone 2 brought with it a bug that meant Plunder mode stats were being applied in the sweatier Battle Royale mode. That meant, as Raven Software put it (opens in new tab), “Some of you are about to have a VERY sus K/D.” The issue was listed on the Warzone 2 Trello board (opens in new tab), and has now been marked as resolved.
The Vega-related crash has yet to show up there or on the Modern Warfare 2 Trello (opens in new tab), however, and I can’t imagine sending another pizza’s going to help.