“Clutch up!” the Call Of Duty blog post detailing Season 1 Reloaded reads. “Multiplayer Ranked Play Is Here!”
Only, it’s not here. When the Modern Warfare III and Warzone Season 1 Reloaded went live Wednesday, Ranked Multiplayer was nowhere to be found. My squad and I were all set to hop back into Ranked (we hadn’t played in MWII for some time so it had been a while) but no such luck.
According to the Call Of Duty Updates Twitter account, Modern Warfare III Ranked has been delayed due to “unforeseen circumstances” as the devs “investigate a recently discovered critical issue.” There’s no word on when Ranked will actually launch beyond “as soon as possible.” Bummer.
We played some on the new map instead. There’s a Rio 24/7 Playlist so we were able to explore the new map to our heart’s content. It’s a decent, smallish map that feels a bit like if you took Favella and Terminal and squashed them together.
Then we tried out the new Supe’d Up mode, which is a pretty fun crossover mode with Amazon’s superhero show The Boys. Basically it’s Kill Confirmed, but when you kill an opponent they drop a vial of Temp V. The Temp V vials work a bit like killstreaks. The first one grants you shields, the second grants you super-speed, the third super-strength and then some powers from the previous The Boys mode that came to Warzone last year.
There’s also a special Boys-themed challenge with special rewards you can unlock by playing.
With these two new attractions out of the way, it was time to hop into Team Gunfight, the new 6v6 take on the popular 2v2 Gunfight mode. Only, wait, there was no Team Gunfight to be found. Okay, how about Headquarters? Nope. No HQ, either.
Of the three new non-Ranked modes advertised for Season 1 Reloaded, only Infected is currently in rotation. This means that only about half of the advertised new content in multiplayer made it into the game: Supe’d Up, Rio and Infected. No Ranked, Team Gunfight, or Headquarters.
With not much left to explore, we hopped over to Warzone, only to be met with a Fetching Online Profile deathloop that we’ve seen before in previous updates. None of us were able to access Warzone at all—even the menus were inaccessible. We tried again later, but were still locked out with the game not seeing a fix until the middle of the night.
On top of all of these issues, the update introduced problems with Zombies, bugs with the Battle Pass making the new HRM-9 submachine gun impossible to unlock, distorted geography on the Urzikstan map, Loadout issues that caused game-breaking bugs, broken Killstreak notifications, etc. etc. etc.
The much ballyhooed Champion’s Quest in Warzone was disabled until this morning at 10am PT and the new Exfil system was removed even before the update went live after players threw such a massive hissy fit that the devs buckled under public pressure, promising a dedicated Exfil mode in the future.
What a mess!
How To Avoid This Nonsense In The Future
I write all of this as a vocal supporter of both Modern Warfare III (which I think is the best Call of Duty in years) and Warzone, both of which I spend ungodly hours playing. I just think maybe it’s time to reassess these big “Reloaded” updates and release more content throughout the season rather than all at once.
Why not introduce Team Gunfight a couple weeks before Ranked, for instance? Why not do Warzone and MWIII updates on different days or even weeks?
This keeps content fresh and avoids these massive FUBAR moments, keeping players happy and devs less stressed out. Easier to put out small fires than major conflagrations. And frequent content updates keep people checking in more regularly. Everybody wins—well, unless that SBMM is going crazy. Then somebody is going down in flames and they’ll let you know about it on reddit!
Stay frosty.
