Black Ops 4 launched worldwide yesterday, and it has been the smoothest Call of Duty release in years, assuming you’re playing on console. Starting at 3:00PM AEDT Friday, players have been partying up and jumping right into battle on PlayStation 4 and Xbox One. If you’re gearing up to play on PC, you might experience some login or crashing issues.
In years past, Call of Duty fans would eagerly wait for that countdown to grab their game, download, and hop online with friends, completely forgetting that release days often come with a few hindrances.
Last year’s Call of Duty: WWII had a rough first day in the trenches with awkward load times, freezing, and server issues that plagued all platforms. If you were able to party up and load into a match, the game just kind of wanted to keep you in that lobby forever.
Often, the final scoreboard would freeze after your match ended, and then suddenly you’re loading into a new match, never getting the chance to back out, fix your classes, or regroup with friends.
Loading out of lobbies and into the required Headquarters social space often meant freezing on black screens, the party getting disbanded, or PS4 blue screen crashing.
Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare’s 2016 release was no better.
Black Ops 4 has featured none of those day-one nightmares for my squad on PlayStation 4, and I’m seeing a pretty positive response on social media for console players.
It’s important that Activision got this right, as Black Ops 4‘s lack of a campaign mode means that if multiplayer didn’t work, players would have absolutely nothing to do. Fortunately, standard multiplayer, Blackout and Zombies all run smoothly for me. I played with groups of friends all afternoon without any of us experiencing disconnects, blue-screens or server issues.
Treyarch gave us a really smooth console launch, so I’m certain I’ve clocked more actual playtime than past launches.
I was pleasantly surprised to find that multiplayer now has silly new Fortnite-style emotes and sprays for wall-tagging, and I’ve been endangering my friends by using those as much as possible.
There’s also a ton of Zombies content to dive into, and I’m already feeling pretty addicted to the new Rush mode, which has a more arcadey, high-score feel than your standard Horde survival mode.
If you’re one of the PC players struggling with crashing, freezing or other issues, there’s a mega-thread on Reddit for discussing the struggle and posting your data, so hopefully these problems can be addressed promptly.
As for me, I’m headed back into battle for more emote shenanigans that get my friends killed.
Comments
6 responses to “Black Ops 4 Is Having The Smoothest Call Of Duty Launch In A While”
We picked it up and I’m not even a COD fan normally. I have to admit, it’s tickled a sweet spot for me. I wanted to get into the whole Battle Royale mode but PUBG was too intimidating and Fortnight was too… well.. I dunno? It just never did it for me. But my son and I played this together last night for ages and it was great 🙂
Not a massive COD fan and I predominantly buy them for the campaign but this is great, blackout is fun and the multiplayer is the best in years, it feels more fair and weighty. Definitely a good popcorn game till rad dad 2
I have had quite a few hard crashes on PS4 pro, during multiplayer. Giving a mitigating host error and having to restart the whole game. But honestly, after like four hours I have had it maybe five times, so all things considered, that isnt bad ‘odds’.
I am enjoying it and while I am a rather average pvp player, it never ceases to amaze me how rapidly better and faster some people are right away. So many times I am getting killed even before i have seen someone. hehe. I feel sorry for people on my team until i find my ‘gun’ and stride.
Really enjoying it. Bought it on PC and PS4.
Blackout has killed PUBG for me.
Bought it purely because I knew that COD would make a great Battle Royale. I haven’t played a cod game in a while and yet to dip into the MP, but blackout is excellent.
I personally wouldn’t say it was a smooth launch experience on PC with the issues I and a few other have had over the weekend.
I’ve had to uninstall and reinstall the game (after multiple attempts at repairing found no issues) due to FPS stutter, objects disappearing such as tree and ground clutter as well as items not showing on the ground. Even my equipped weapon would disappear entirely and ADSing would just be a zoomed in mess.
As for servers in Blackout we were constantly joining ghost servers with 180 ping that just wouldn’t fill and would have to keep trying to leave match and match make again until we got in to a proper server.
Also seemed to have issues where as a squad we would join a server that some of us would get 280 ping (Being in Darwin) but our other teammates in Brisbane would get 30 ping which again would force us to leave the match to try try again. I can only assume the game was routing us outside of Australia back to the oceanic servers for some reason.
While the game has been fun in some instances, so far the game is more frustrating than fun but it is the first week of the game being out so I’m hoping those issues will fix themselves organically over the next few days/weeks.
Is it better than the Beta? I didn’t feel it in the Betas.