The Call of Duty Vanguard and Warzone Pacific Season 2 update has been delayed

Activision has delayed the launch of Call of Duty Vanguard and Warzone Pacific Season 2 due to ongoing issues with the games and 2019’s Modern Warfare.

The Season 2 release date has been pushed back by 12 days to an “expected” February 14 launch in order to allow developers to prioritise “balancing and optimizing” the gameplay experience in light of various problems.

An update on the official Call of Duty site today reads: “Currently, our community is experiencing issues across Call of Duty: Vanguard, Warzone Pacific, and Modern Warfare.

“We feel your frustrations and hear you loud and clear.

“To date, we’ve deployed a number of updates, but more needs to be done.”

It added: “We will use this additional development time to deliver updates, including optimizations to gameplay, game balancing (including weapon and equipment balancing), to fix game stability and bugs, and to ensure an overall level of polish to improve the experience for players across Vanguard, Warzone Pacific, Black Ops Cold War, and Modern Warfare.

“Upcoming implementations will address several concerns raised by the community and other quality-of-life improvements. Adjusting the core gameplay loop, mechanics, and balance is a continuing and important focus. Fixes will apply to your platform of choice — two generations of consoles and PC — as well as gameplay in general across all five systems.”

Activision also said that going forward, players can expect to hear from it “more often regarding Call of Duty’s state of play”, following recent criticism from fans over a lack of communication about game updates.

Warzone has suffered from various performance issues since the launch of its Pacific update and new map, Caldera, over a month ago.

Activision’s Call of Duty studios acknowledged last week that Vanguard and Modern Warfare are also suffering from notable issues.

Delays in addressing problems with the games have been heavily criticised by some fans, but work was disrupted by the holiday period and remains hampered by ongoing strike action at Activision Blizzard.

The strikes, which are being led by developers at Warzone maker Raven Software, are in protest of plans to terminate the contracts of 12 QA workers on January 28.

The layoffs will reduce Raven’s QA team of 40 staff, which mainly works on Warzone, by just over 30%, according to those staging the strikes.

Related

1

Call of Duty Warzone developers are staging a walkout today over job cuts

12 members of Raven’s QA team were let go on Friday

Several dozen Activision Blizzard workers are currently striking, according to a Washington Post report published on Monday.

“The reason the games are buggier is definitely due to the strike,” a quality assurance tester, currently on strike, told the publication. “You can’t just lose some of your hardest working people and expect nothing to happen.”

Microsoft announced on Tuesday that it intends to acquire Activision Blizzard for $68.7 billion. Giving Xbox exclusive ownership of Call of Duty, Warcraft, Overwatch, Crash Bandicoot, Guitar Hero and more, the deal is expected to close during Microsoft’s fiscal year ending in June 2023.