There seems to be a fault with one of Activision’s Call of Duty games; some PlayStation 5 owners are reportedly struggling to play the Modern Warfare reboot from 2019 on their consoles, and the blame is being put on Warzone – what did Warzone ever do?
Apparently, when users are attempting to access one of the three main components in the game, whether it be the Campaign, Multiplayer, or the Spec Ops mode, players are being greeted with an incredibly annoying message that claims certain “data packs” are not installed. That’s just the beginning of the issue as well because when users start the process of following this prompt, they are then confronted with another message that claims the installation has been “suspended” and as it stands, it’s an issue that cannot be fixed.
For all the players that are facing this problem, where the data packs won’t download and a simple restart also isn’t possible, it becomes even more annoying when you realize that Activision has been aware of this situation for months, with no attempt to fix it. The Activision support page does show the problem has been listed, but the lack of effort to try and amend this annoying problem just makes the whole situation that much worse.
Now we come to the reason as to why Warzone is being blamed by some. Since the integration of Warzone into the Modern Warfare reboot, playing the game has become a tedious experience; with almost every single Warzone patch, the data packs to play Modern Warfare are then deleted, which then forces players to re-download hundreds of gigabytes worth of data. One of the reasons is down to the fact that the game is absolutely huge, with the current build taking up almost 200GB of storage.
Warzone (and the Modern Warfare launcher) came with many problems as it was passed about from developer to developer since release, with so much effort being put into getting the most out of the game’s footprint. However, due to the fact the PlayStation operating system requires a new data pack with every optimization, it means the packs slowly begin to add up, thus needing a hell of a lot of space – and if you don’t know, there have been 26 different packs for the player to download so far.
The really weird thing is that Warzone has not been affected by these issues, which kind of tells us the story itself. Due to Warzone becoming a hit with fans, all available resources were shifted towards it, meaning that Modern Warfare was soon forgotten about. At the moment, all we can hope for is that with the impending release of Warzone 2, Activision will phase out Warzone, which will hopefully clean everything up, but that’s not happening soon enough.
Activision’s credibility will take a hit with this one (as if it wasn’t hit already) and the worry is that they make the same mistake when Modern Warfare 2 comes out, and then integrate Warzone 2 into that game, or they could learn from their mistakes and make sure it never happens again. Either of these is extremely possible.
